li 



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Svl>NV 




Class 7"/ f 



Book 'I^i 7- 



FLAME, ELECTRICITY, AND 
THE CAMERA 





A, B and C 

COMBINED 





A and B 

COMBINED 



,1 HTAJ'I 

bnelloH 1 



Plate I. 

Basilarchia lorguinif BoisAwvoX, $. (Lorquin's Admiral.) 
From The Butterfly Book, by Dr. W J. Holland. 

A REPRODUCTION OF A BUTTERFLY BY THE THREE-COLOUR PROCESS. 
Showing separate printing of each plate, A, B, and C ; the first and second plates combined, and the finished picture, 

•^ See page 2S8. 



Flame, Electricity and 
the Camera 



Man's Progress from the 

First Kindling of Fire to the Wireless Telegraph 

and the Photography of Color 



By George lies 




New York 

Doubleday & McClure Co. 

igoi 



X 






Copyright, 1900, by 
DOUBLEDAY & McClURE CO. 



TranefirrH from 
Lib 



ansn . ^<:.^ 



^ 



/ 



ipi 






TO 

JAMES DOUGLAS, LL.D. 

OF NEW YORK 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Introductory i 

II. Flame and its First Uses 8 

III. The First Gains from Kindled Flame .... 24 

IV. The Mastery of Metals 35 

V. Motive Power from Fire 48 

VI. The Banishment of Heat 64 

VII. The Higher Teachings of Fire 79 

VIII. The Production of Electricity 94 

IX. Electric Heat no 

X. Electric Light 121 

XI. Electric Batteries 135 

xii. Electricity in the Service of the Mechanic 

and the Engineer 153 

XIII. Telegraphy — Land Lines 177 

XIV. Cable Telegraphy 193 

XV. Multiplex Telegraphy 207 

XVI. Wireless Telegraphy 215 

XVII. The Telephone 228 

XVIII. Electricity — A Review and a Prospect . ". . 247 

XIX. The Threshold of Photography 262 

XX. Truth of Form — Translation and Reproduc- 
tion of Colour 276 

XXI. Swiftness and Adaptability — The Dry Plate — 

A New World Conquered 290 

XXII. The Work of Quick Plates — Photographic 

Reproduction 311 

xxiiL Photography of the Skies 325 

XXIV. Photography and Electricity as Allies . . . 346 

XXV. Language 364 

XXVI. The Ancestry of Man in the Light of Nine- 
teenth-century Advances 379 

Appendix: The Golden Age of Science .... 386 
vii 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Plate I. Butterfly in natural colors . . . Frontispiece 

Fig. I. Making fire. Hupa Indians Page 15 

" 2. Strike-a-light in use "16 

" 3. Iroquois pump-drill for making fire , . . "17 

" 4. Fire-making by sawing . "18 

" 5. Flint and steel, Otoe Indians "19 

'- 6. Eskimo lamp ' "24 

" 7. Hero's aeolipile "29 

" 8. Primitive bronze horn ''38 

" 9. Westinghouse compound engine .... "51 

" 10. Interior, Parsons steam-turbine .... "54 

" II. Baldwin locomotive Facing page 57 

*' 12. Parsons-Westinghouse | 

turbo-alternator \ ^' 

" 13. Lancashire boiler Page 58 

" 14. Fire in tube. Water in tube "59 

" 15. Babcock & Wilcox water-tube boiler . . "59 

" 16. Refrigerator, Frick Co "66 

" 17. Air compressed, then expanded .... "71 

" 18. Vacuum by use of liquid hydrogen ... "74 

" 19. Dewar flask "78 

" 20. Interference water-waves "80 

" 21. Interference light- waves "80 

" 22. Gilbert's electroscope "96 

" 23. Von Guericke's first electrical machine . . "97 

" 24. Electrical repulsion and attraction ... "99 

Plate II. Volta . Facing page 100 

Fig. 25. Galvani's experiment Page 100 

" 26. Volta's pile "100 

Plate III. Faraday Facing page 105 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Fig. 27. Volta's crown of cups .... Facing page 107 

28. Orsted's experiment Page 103 

29. Solenoid " 104 

30. Magnetic lines of force " 105 

31. Electric lines of force "105 

32. Sturgeon's electromagnet "105 

^^. Henry's electromagnet . " 105 

34. Electrical induction "106 

35. Faraday's magneto-electric machine . Facing page 107 

36. Gramme machine Page 107 

37. Metal shaped under electric heat .... " iii 

38. Old weld and new "112 

39. Water-tank electric forge "114 

40. Electric furnace "114 

41. Electric blowpipe "117 

42. First incandescent lamp "124 

43. Nernst lamp "128 

44. Simple Geissler tube "129 

45. Geissler tube with external electrodes . . "129 

46. Glass sphere luminous between ^ 
two metal plates ^ . . . . 130 

47. Cuban fire-fly .......... " 131 

48. Gutenberg statue "139 

49. Storage battery plates "146 

50. Ruhmkorfif coil " 157 

51. Electric motor and pump united . Facing page 162 

52. Armature of street-car motor ..." "162 

53. Third-rail electric traction . . . . " "165 

54. Henry telegraph , Page 181 

55. Telegraph relay " 184 

56. Grounding a circuit "185 

57. First glass insulator "186 

58. Calais-Dover cable, 1851 "195 

59. Commercial cable, 1894 ^' 202 

60. Condenser " 204 

61. Reflecting galvanometer " 205 

62. Siphon recorder .......... " 206 

Plate IV. Lord Kelvin Facing page 206 

Fig. 63. Siphon record . . Page 206 



ILLUSTRATIONS xi 

Fig. 64. Delany perforated message Page 207 

" 65. Simple electromagnet " 209 

" 66. Signalling by reversing polarity . . . , " 210 

" 67. Double-wound electromagnet "210 

" 68. Duplex telegraph . . . "211 

" 69. Duplex telegraph, hydraulic model . . . " 212 

Plate V. Edison Facmg page 213 

Fig. 70. Delany synchronous telegraph Page 214 

" 71. Marconi coherer "220 

" 72. Marconi telegraph apparatus " 221 

" 73. Discontinuous waves " 225 

" 74. Wehnelt interrupter . = "226 

" 75. Lovers' telegraph "231 

" 76. Microphone " 232 

" 77. Telephone dissected " 233 

" 78. Telephonic circuit " 233 

Plate VI. Chinese telephone substation . Facing page 239 

Fig. 79. Photophone Page 244 

" 80. Carving from caves, Dordogne Valley, France " 264 

" 81. Indian carving " 266 

" 82. Maple leaf photographed " 269 

" 83. Amoeba , " 273 

Plate VII. Niepce Facing page 274 

" VIII. Daguerre , " "276 

" IX. Flowers photographed on ordi- ) 

\ " " 28^ 

NARY AND ORTHOCHROMATIC PLATES ) ^ 

Fig. 84. Kromskop Page 286 

Plate X. Miss Draper Facing page 290 

" XI. Swiss scene through ordinary 



AND TELEPHOTO LENSES i ■ 

" XII. PiKA, OR LITTLE CHIEF HARE ..." '' 299 

" XII. Deer photographed at night . . " " 299 

" XIII. "The West Wind," by T. Whitall ) 

> " " -^07 

Nicholson ) ^ ' 

Fig. 85. Zoetrope Page 315 

Plate XIV. Edison kinetographic films . Facing page 316 

" XV. Composite portrait " " 319 

Fig. S6. Half-tone portrait of Lord Kelvin, ) p 

much enlarged ) 



xii ILLUSTRATIONS 

Fig. 87. Satellites of Saturn P^ge 329 

Plate XVI. Comet of 1882 Facing page 330 

Fig. 88. Doppler theory illustrated Page 334 

Plate XVII. Spectra of Beta Auriga . Facing page 337 
" XVII. Spectra of sun and of iron 
" XVIII. Drawing of Nebula in Orion. 
" XIX. Photograph of nebula in Orion 
" XX. Spiral nebula and ring nebula 

" XXI. Bolometer spectrum .... 

Fig. 89. Lenard tube Page 350 

" 90. Crookes tube photographing hand . . " 352 

" 91. Fargis recorder " 360 

Plate XXII. Lightning photographed . Facing page 360 

Fig. 92. Photography of sound ..... Page 361 

" 93. Genesis of " R " "375 





337 




341 




341 




342 




347 



PREFACE 

This book is an attempt briefly to recite the chief uses 
of fire, electricity, and photography, bringing the narrative 
of discovery and invention to the close of 1899. In cover- 
ing so much ground it has been necessary to choose from 
a vast array of facts such of them as are fairly representa- 
tive, laying stress upon those whose proven importance or 
high promise gives them most prominence in the public 
mind. Passing to the laws which underlie invention and 
discovery, this book endeavours to answer the question, 
Why has the nineteenth century added more to science 
than all preceding time? It will be found that the latest 
achievements of man illuminate his path of progress in 
remarkable fashion, and enable us to discern the promise 
of the wireless telegraph in the first blaze kindled by a 
savage, to understand how photography in natural colours 
has succeeded to the first rude contours drawn by the hand 
of man. Throughout the volume it is sought, also, to 
show how profoundly recent accessions to knowledge are 
transforming the foundations of social, political, and eco- 
nomic life, while, at the same time, they are correcting 
and broadening the deepest convictions of the human 
soul. 

The author is under obligations first and chiefly to John 
Fiske, the dean of American evolutionists, who accorded his 
generous commendation to the draft of this volume which 
he read in the summer of 1899. Other indebtedness is ac- 

xiii 



xiv PREFACE 

knowledged in the course of the book ; it is here fitting that 
grateful thanks should be rendered to the revisers whose 
names follow, acquitting them of any error which may have 
entered into the work since its first correction at their 
hands : Mr. J. C. Abel, editor Photographic Times, New 
York; Mr. F. H. Badger, city electrician, Montreal; Pro- 
fessor F. W. Clarke, chemist to the United States Geologi- 
cal Survey, Washington; Mr. James Douglas, president 
Copper Queen Company, New York; Professor C. Han- 
ford Henderson, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York; 
Mr. Walter Hough, United States National Museum, 
Washington ; Mr. Ernest Ingersoll, New York ; Mr. W. D. 
Le Sueur, Ottawa, Canada ; Mr. Edward S. Morse, director, 
Peabody Academy of Science, Salem, Massachusetts ; Mr. 
G. F. C. Smihie, engraver, United States Bureau of Engrav- 
ing and Printing, Washington ; Mr. T. W. Smillie, chief pho- 
tographer. United States National Museum, Washington ; 
and Mr. Edward William Thomson, Boston, Massachusetts. 
The sources of several illustrations are acknowledged as 
they appear ; other obligations are as follows : From the 
publishers of the Electrical World and Engineer, New 
York (from their Electrotechnical Series, edited by Pro- 
fessor E. J. Houston and Mr. A. E. Kennelly), Figs. 29, 
35, 37, 38, 40, 42, 55, and 65; from Dr. David Gill, 
director Royal Observatory, Cape of Good Hope, Plate 
XVI ; from Mr. Louis Glass, San Francisco, Plate VI ; from 
Mr. N. H. Heft, New Haven, Fig. 53 ; from Professor James 
E. Keeler, director Lick Observatory, Mount Hamilton, 
California, Plate XIX; from Professor .S. P. Langley, 
secretary Smithsonian Institution, Washington, Fig. 47 
and Plate XXI ; from Professor E. C Pickering, direc- 
tor Harvard Observatory, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 
the spectrum of Beta Aurigae, part of Plate XVII (much 
reduced) and Plate XVIII; from Mr. T. W. Smillie, chief 
photographer. United States National Museum, Washington, 



PREFACE XV 

Plate VIII (here retouched) and Plates VII and XV; from 
the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, Figs. i-6, taken 
from monographs by Mr. Walter Hough in the series of 
the United States National Museum ; from the United 
States Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, Figs. 8,80, and 81. 

The author desires to remind the reader that "' the- 
multiplication of effects," here illustrated with details 
drawn from the recent progress of science, forms the theme 
of a chapter in Herbert Spencer's First Principles. 

The main argument of this book was indicated by the 
author in the Popular Science Monthly, June, 1876. Pro- 
fessor William Stanley Jevons, author of The Principles 
of Science y said that this preliminary statement contained 
** many acute and profound suggestions." A second and 
fuller outline appeared in the Popular Science Monthly, 
June, 1896. 

New York, March, 1900. 



CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTORY 

WITH the mastery of electricity man enters upon his 
first real sovereignty of nature. As we hear the 
whir of the dynamo or listen at the telephone, as we turn 
the button of an incandescent lamp or 
travel in an electromobile, we are par- a New Supremacy and 
takers in a revolution more swift and **® Meaning, 

profound than has ever before been en- 
acted upon earth. Until the nineteenth century fire was 
justly accounted the most useful and versatile servant of 
man. To-day electricity is doing all that fire ever did, and 
doing it better, while it accomplishes uncounted tasks far 
beyond the reach of flame, however ingeniously applied. 
We may thus observe under our eyes just such an impetus 
to human intelligence and power as when fire was first sub- 
dued to the purposes of man, with the immense advantage 
that, whereas the subjugation of fire demanded ages of 
weary and uncertain experiment, the mastery of electricity 
is, for the most part, the assured work of the nineteenth 
century, and, in truth, very largely of its last three decades. 
The triumphs of the electrician are of absorbing interest in 
themselves, they bear a higher significance to the student 
of man as a creature who has gradually come to be what 
he is. In tracing the new horizons won by electric science 
and art, a beam of light falls on the long and tortuous paths 

J 



2 INTRODUCTORY 

by which man rose to his supremacy long before the drama 
of human Hfe had found a singer or a chronicler. 

Of the strides taken by humanity on its way to the sum- 
mit of terrestrial life, there are but four worthy of mention 
as preparing the way for the victories of the electrician — 
the attainment of the upright attitude, the intentional 
kindling of fire, the maturing of emotional cries to articu- 
late speech, and the invention of written symbols for speech. 
As we examine electricity in its fruitage we shall find that 
it bears the unfailing mark of every other decisive factor of 
human advance : its mastery is no mere addition to the re- 
sources of the race, but a multiplier of them. The case is 
not as when an explorer discovers a plant hitherto un- 
known, such as Indian corn, which takes its place beside 
rice and wheat as a new food, and so measures a service 
which ends there. Nor is it as when a prospector comes 
upon a new metal, such as nickel, with the sole effect of 
increasing the variety of materials from which a smith 
may fashion a hammer or a blade. Almost infinitely 
higher is the benefit wrought when energy in its most 
useful phase is, for the first time, subjected to the will 
of man, with dawning knowledge of its unapproachable 
powers. It begins at once to marry the resources of 
the mechanic and the chemist, the engineer and the artist, 
with issue attested by all its own fertility, while its rays 
reveal province after province undreamed of, and indeed 
unexisting, before its advent. 

Every other primal gift of man rises to a new height at 
the bidding of the electrician. All the deftness and skill 
that have followed from the upright attitude, in its creation 
of the human hand, have been brought to a new edge and 
a broader range through electric art. Between the uses of 
flame and electricity have sprung up alliances which have 
created new wealth for the miner and the metal-worker, 
the manufacturer and the shipmaster, with new insights 



INTERLACEMENTS 3 

for the man of research. Articulate speech borne on elec- 
tric waves makes itself heard half-way across America, and 
words reduced to the symbols of symbols — expressed in the 
perforations of a strip of paper — take flight through a tele- 
graph wire at twenty-fold the pace of speech. Because 
the latest leap in knowledge and faculty has been won by 
the electrician, he has widened the scientific outlook vastly 
more than any explorer who went before. Beyond any 
predecessor, he began with a better equipment and a larger 
capital to prove the gainfulness which ever attends the ex- 
ploiting a supreme agent of discovery. 

As we trace a few of the unending interlacements of 
electrical science and art with other sciences and arts, and 
study their mutually stimulating effects, we shall be re- 
minded of a series of permutations where the latest of the 
factors, because latest, multiplies all prior factors in an un- 
exampled degree. 1 We shall find reason to believe that 
this is not merely a suggestive analogy, but really true as 
a tendency, not only with regard to man's gains by the 
conquest of electricity, but also with respect to every other 
signal victory which has brought him to his present pin- 
nacle of discernment and rule. If this permutative prin- 
ciple in former advances lay undetected, it stands forth 
clearly in that latest accession to skill and interpretation 
which has been ushered in by Franklin and Volta, Fara- 
day and Henry. 



1 Permutations are the various ways in which two or more different things 
may be arranged in a row, all the things appearing in each row. Permutations 
are readily illustrated with squares or cubes of diiferent colours, with numbers, 
or letters. 

Permutations of two elements, I and 2, are (1x2) two ; I, 2 ; 2, I ; or a, ^/ 

b, a. Of three elements the permutations are (i x 2 x 3) six; I, 2, 3; i, 3, 2; 
2, 1,3; 2, 3, I ; 3, 1,2; 3, 2, I ; or a, b, c; a, c, b; b, a, c; b, c, a; c, a, b; 

c, b, a. Of four elements the permutations are (1x2x3x4) twenty-four; of 
five elements, one hundred and twenty, and so on. A new element or permu- 
tator multiplies by an increasing figure all the permutations it finds. 



4 INTRODUCTORY 

Although of much less moment than the triumphs of 
the electrician, the discovery of photography ranks second 
in importance among the scientific feats 
Light as a Limner, of the nineteenth century. The camera 
is an artificial eye with almost every 
power of the human retina, and with many that are denied 
to vision — however ingeniously fortified by the lens-maker. 
A brief outline of photographic history will show a par- 
allel to the permutative impulse so conspicuous in the 
progress of electricity. At the points where the elec- 
trician and the photographer collaborate we shall note 
achievements such as only the loftiest primal powers may 
evoke. 

A brief story of what electricity and its necessary pre- 
cursor, fire, have done and promise to do for civilisation, may 
have attraction in itself; so, also, may a 
Permutative Muiti- review, though most cursory, of the 

plication a Universal ' o ^ > 

Rule of Progress. work of the Camera and all that led up 
to it : for the provinces here are as wide 
as art and science, and their bounds comprehend well- 
nigh the entirety of human exploits. And between the 
lines of this story we may read another — one which may 
tell us something of the earliest stumblings in the dawn of 
human faculty. When we compare man and his next of 
kin, we find between the two a great gulf, surely the widest 
betwixt any allied families in nature. Can a being of in- 
tellect, conscience, and aspiration have sprung at any time, 
however remote, from the same stock as the orang and the 
chimpanzee? Since 1859, when Darwin published his 
Origin of Species, the theory of evolution has become so 
generally accepted that to-day it is little more assailed 
than the doctrine of gravitation. And yet, while the 
average man of intelligence bows to the formula that 
all which now exists has come from the simplest conceiv- 
able state of things, — a universal nebula, if you will, — in 



PROGRESS HAS LEAPS 5 

his secret soul he makes one exception — himself. That 
there is a great deal more assent than conviction in the 
world is a chiding which may come as justly from the 
teacher's table as from the preacher's pulpit. Now, if we 
but catch the meaning of man's mastery of electricity, we 
shall have light upon his earlier steps as a fire-kindler, and 
as a graver of pictures and symbols on bone and rock. 
As we thus recede from civilisation to primeval savagery, 
the process of the making of man may become so clear 
that the arguments of Darwin shall be received with 
conviction, and not with silent repulse. 

As we proceed to recall, one by one, the salient chapters 
in the history of fire, and of the arts of depiction that fore- 
ran the camera, we shall perceive a 
truth of high significance. We shall Growth is slow, 

... r 1 1 • Efflorescence 

see that, while every new faculty has its is Rapid. 

roots deep in older powers, and while 
its growth may have been going on for age after age, yet its 
flowering may be as the event of a morning. Even as our 
gardens show us the century-plants, once supposed to bloom 
only at the end of a hundred years, so history, in the large, 
exhibits discoveries whose consequences are realised only 
after the lapse of eons instead of years. The arts of fire 
were slowly elaborated until man had produced the cruci- 
ble and the still, through which his labours culminated in 
metals purified, in acids vastly more corrosive than those 
of vegetation, in glass and porcelain equally resistant to 
flame and the electric wave. These were combined in an 
hour by Volta to build his cell, and in that hour began a 
new era for human faculty and insight. 

It is commonly imagined that the progress of humanity 
has been at a tolerably uniform pace. Our review of that 
progress will show that here and there in its course have 
been leaps, as radically new forces have been brought 
under the dominion of man. We of the electric revoiu- 



6 INTRODUCTORY 

tion are sharply marked off from our great-grandfathers, 
who looked upon the cell of Volta as a curious toy. 
They, in their turn, were profoundly differenced from the 
men of the seventeenth century, who had not learned that 
flame could outvie the horse as a carrier, and grind wheat 
better than the mill urged by the breeze. And nothing 
short of an abyss stretches between these men and their 
remote ancestors, who had not found a way to warm their 
frosted fingers, or lengthen with lamp or candle the short, 
dark days of winter. 

Throughout the pages of this book there will be some 
recital of the victories won by the fire-maker, the electri- 
cian, the photographer, and many more in the peerage of 
experiment and research. Underlying the sketch will ap- 
pear the significant contrast betwixt accessions of minor 
and of supreme dignity. The finding a new wood, such as 
that of the yew, means better bows for the archer, stronger 
handles for the tool-maker; the subjugation of a universal 
force such as fire, or electricity, stands for the exaltation 
of power in every field of toil, for the creation of a new 
earth for the worker, new heavens for the thinker. As a 
corollary, we shall observe that an increasing width of gap 
marks off the successive stages of human progress from 
each other, so that its latest stride is much the longest and 
most decisive. And it will be further evident that, while 
every new faculty is of age-long derivation from older 
powers and ancient aptitudes, it nevertheless comes to the 
birth in a moment, as it were, and puts a strain of prob- 
ably fatal severity on those contestants who miss the new 
gift by however little. We shall, therefore, find that the 
principle of permutation, here merely indicated, accounts 
in large measure for three cardinal facts in the history of 
man : First, his leaps forward ; second, the constant ac- 
celerations in these leaps ; and third, the gap in the record 
of the tribes which, in the illimitable past, have succumbed 



A SUPPLANTEK 7 

as forces of a new edge and sweep have become engaged 
in the fray.^ 

The interlacements of the arts of fire and of electricity 
are intimate and pervasive. While many of the uses of 
flame date back to the dawn of human skill, many more 
have come to new and higher value within the last hundred 
years. Fire to-day yields motive power with tenfold the 
economy of a hundred years ago, and motive power thus 
derived is the main source of modern electric currents. In 
metallurgy there has long been an unwitting preparation 
for the advent of the electrician, and here the services of 
fire within the nineteenth century have won triumphs upon 
which the later successes of electricity largely proceed. 
In producing alloys, and in the singular use of heat to eff"ect 
its own banishment, novel and radical developments have 
been recorded within the past decade or two. These, also, 
make easier and bolder the electrician's tasks. The open- 
ing chapters of this book will, therefore, bestow a glance at 
the principal uses of fire as these have been revealed and 
applied. This glance will make clear how fire and elec- 
tricity supplement each other with new and remarkable 
gains, while in other fields, not less important, electricity is 
nothing else than a supplanter of the very force which 
made possible its own discovery and impressment. 

1 Some years ago I sent an outline of this argument to Herbert Spencer, 
who replied : ** I recognise a novelty and value in your inference that the law 
implies an increasing width of gap between lower and higher types as evolu- 
tion advances." 



CHAPTER II 

FLAME AND ITS FIRST USES 

ON that familiar theme, the significance of common 
things, a word may still be spoken. Nothing is 
commoner, nothing is more necessary to civilisation, than 

fire, which was to primitive man a luxury 
Fire To-day and of Old. both costly and prccarious. There may 

be both profit and interest in a glance at 
the steps which join the fire-user of to-day with the fire- 
user of old. Let us begin at home. 

Upon a village near the Hudson, twenty miles from New 
York, dawn is slowly breaking in early winter. From the 
moment when a match is struck to boil the tea-kettle until, 
at the close of the working-day, the evening lamp is ex- 
tinguished, the dependence of that village on fire is so con- 
stant that life can hardly be imagined without it. Were 
there no fire there could be no soap to wash with, no win- 
dow-pane to reveal the threat or promise of the morning 
sky, no rolls nor coflfee, neither plate nor cup, no knife and 
fork for bread and chop. The house itself is born of fire. 
Its furnace for heating was built of molten iron ; its smoke 
pours into a chimney whose brick, together with the tiles of 
the hearth, the cement of the cellar, and the plaster of the 
walls, came out of diverse flaming kilns. Other kilns dried 
the pine and cedar for the outer walls, the floors and roof; 
every plank and board was turned out cheaply and quickly 



CREATES THE HOME 9 

by giant saws, all furnace-driven„ From smelted ores came 
the boiler of copper, the water-pipe of lead, the gas-pipe 
of iron, the bell-wires of steel, with every nail, hook, and 
rivet for their securing. As with the house, so with its 
furnishings : its carpets and curtains, as well as the clothing 
of the family, were made by harnessing a steam-engine for 
the business, though all might have been manually carded, 
spun, and woven from the sheep's back and the cotton-boll. 

A railroad train for the metropolis is taken, with further 
indebtedness to fire. Coal glows beneath the engine boiler, 
while flame has plainly been a factor in all that surrounds 
the passenger, from car-frame to window-screen, from the 
telegraph wire through which the train gets orders, to the 
steel rails upon which it is swiftly borne. The journey 
ends in a city plainly dependent upon fire at every turn — 
from the steel building going up by the aid of an oil-engine, 
to the peddler's tray of enamelled badges, which repeat 
the reds and blues of the flames that painted them. 

These every-day observations might be multiplied indefi- 
nitely; they suggest the question, Could man be man 
without fire? Not his arts of life only, but he himself has 
come to be what he is through changes, for the larger 
part gradual, during uncounted ages. If the clock of time 
could be turned back for millions of years, we should see 
the progenitors of mankind the brethren of the brute, be- 
cause fireless as the brute is to-day. In so far as the 
blurred and scanty story of early man can be pieced to- 
gether, it tells us that nothing has done more to part man 
from his lowly kindred than his acquired mastery of flame. 

However far back the lineage of man-in-the-making 
may be traced, we are obliged to think of him as begin- 
ning with some decided superiority to his kindred of the 
forest and the plain. His advantage may have lain in 
keener sight, in a better faculty of prehension, or in that 
quickening of the intelligence which has its spring in afi"eC' 



lo FLAME AND ITS FIRST USES 

tion, as in his companion the dog. Whatever the point of 
departure of man from brute, in nothing could his human 
quality have been more decisively evinced than in his be- 
haviour toward fire. While other animals looked upon a 
blaze with idle allurement or stupid fear, he had sense 
enough to see that some of its work was good ; its radiance 
in wintry air was sunlike and cordial, its half-burned sticks 
were tools for food-getting, were weapons for battle. 

Then, as now, volcanoes were the chief sources of natural 
fire ; next would rank oil-wells, such as those of Baku 
on the Caspian Sea, which in historic times have flamed 
or smouldered for generations together. Many minor 
agencies were less uncommon — a lightning-stroke setting 
a tree ablaze, a meteorite descending on withered under- 
brush, a globule of dew or balsam focussing a sunbeam on 
resinous twigs, a storm driving the stems of a bamboo 
grove against each other until sheer friction excited flame. 
At Bavispe, in Mexico, an earthquake in May, 1887, was 
accompanied by devastating fires ; nearly every range of 
hills in the surrounding country had its trees set ablaze by 
the sparks from hard stones as they smote against each 
other in swift descent. The beach-wrecked carcass of a 
whale, around which dead leaves and straw had gathered, 
has been known to burst into fire, a type of many a case of 
spontaneous ignition that offered man the golden gift of 
flame when he knew but enough to enjoy it with passive 
wonder. As he would watch a conflagration take its way 
through a clump of trees or a stretch of dry marsh, he 
learned much : the flame was here sluggish, there fierce ; 
one bush was consumed as if by lightning, another in dense 
smoke and slowly; through sun-parched grass and under- 
woods a blaze would sometimes sweep so fast as to imprison 
deer and stifle birds — the incidental baked meats not with- 
out their hint of cooking. Then came the action which, 
simple as it is, has never been observed in any mere brute 



THE HAND APPEARS ii 

— the deliberate adding of fuel to jfire so as to prolong its 
benefits. Perhaps this was done in pure playfulness, ex- 
cited by the enjoyment of seeing the sparkle and hearing 
the crackle of the flames ; but it presently confirmed the 
observation that the pine burns better than the redwood, 
that the hickory, beech, and mesquite yield the hottest fire. 
But to what prior advantage was this early man beholden 
for intelhgence already distinctly human? The answer is 
that for ages his brain had been informed 
and strengthened by his hand. Yet me- The upright Attitude, 
chanical skill was no monopoly of his ; 
birds could, with bill and feet, all but manipulate twigs, 
moss, leaves, and fibre for their nests, or carve out of wood 
and earth receptacles for their eggs ; elephants could tear 
from trees boughs long enough to wield with their trunks 
and scratch leeches from their sides; monkeys, rending 
branches in quest of nuts and fruit, could on occasion throw 
them as missiles, and had learned to dispose these branches 
for rude shelter from wind and rain. Here already was the 
significant heightening of bodily powers by the seizure and 
use of things outside the body. A stick made the brute's 
arm longer, a stone made deadly a blow from his fist ; in 
external aids so simple lay the germ of all mechanic art. 
How was it that man had already become the one devel- 
oper of that art? Because he had acquired the upright 
attitude long before the days we are trying to recall. 
When his upper limbs had become arms and hands, freed 
from the drudgery of locomotion, his long fingers and op- 
posable thumbs had learned many an aptitude denied the 
elephant's trunk or the gorilla's paw. And every gain in 
skill and deftness did its best work in enlarging and clari- 
fying his brain as a thinking instrument.^ 

1 Dr. William Munro treats "The Relation between the Erect Posture and 
the Physical and Intellectual Development of Man," in his Pi^ehistoric 
Proble77is. W. Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh and London, 1897. 



12 FLAME AND ITS FIRST USES 

If we assume, in retracing the first steps of man, that 
the thing easiest to do was the thing first done, he began 

by dashing against a stone whatever he 

Observation and Ex- wished to break ; then he took from the 

periment. ground sticks and stones and grasped 

them for new convenience and effect ; 
afterward, when even the best that he could find were not 
what he wanted, he passed to the breaking, or biting, or 
rubbing, or grinding of branches, boulders, pebbles into 
such shapes as he desired. Whenever he, being near to 
natural fire, acted on the impulse, born of curiosity and 
dexterity, to put stick and stone in the flame, at first with 
the equal hope that both would burn, he crossed another 
of the bridges over which no brute has ever had the wit to 
follow him. He passed from the field of mechanics to the 
higher walk of chemistry. He had long been able to alter 
the shape of an object ; he now gained power to change its 
substance as well. 

He found that the stoutest staffs, held over the fire, soon 
turned black, lost their strength, and could be shaken to 
fragments with the slightest blow. He learned that some 
of the hardest stones, the granites, were split by flame — 
to this day the quarrymen of southern India part their 
granite blocks with fire. He discovered that limestones 
crumbled as they changed their hue to white ; that sand- 
stones stood unscathed, however furious the heat that bathed 
them. It was by such resistance to fire, as well as by its 
close texture, that soapstone recommended itself to the 
Eskimos as the material for their lamps. Primitive man 
observed, too, that the clay or sand on which his fire was 
oftenest laid remained unconsumed. As his brain grew 
more perceptive, he noticed that sometimes, where fire had 
scorched the ground, plants afterward bloomed with rare 
luxuriance — a useful hint when he came to be a deliberate 
planter and cultivator of the soil. We may well suppose 



THE GUARDING OF FIRE 13 

that one of his first cosmetics was the soot from oily fuel, 
that the biting quality of water mixed with ashes was re- 
marked early in the day of fire-using. Thus began the 
art of making many substances rare or quite unknown before, 
each discovery raising curiosity and dexterity to a new 
pitch. In the long afternoons of savage leisure, uncounted 
random observations, or even experiments, served to im- 
plant the vague faith in transmutation which later kindled 
the hopes of alchemy. How strangely were leaf and flower, 
twig and root, changed in colour and quality at the touch 
of fire ! What was to prevent their returning as mysteri- 
ously as they had vanished in a blaze? 

The more use and interest man found in fire, the more 
anxious he became to maintain it as long as he could. 
Fuel might be scarce; to seek and fetch it long distances 
might be an arduous enterprise ; hence unremitting care 
was taken to preserve embers under cloaks of sand, or 
earth, or what not, none of them better than their own 
ashes well pressed down. Such cloaks were of peculiar 
value when fire had to be carried from place to place, for 
they at once protected it from exhaustion and made its 
carriage safe and easy. When Europeans first touched at 
the Andaman Islands they found the natives able to pre- 
serve fire, but ignorant of how to create it. The arts of 
maintaining and transporting fire were practised so long, 
and under so grievous penalty, that we find flame faith- 
fully perpetuated on the altars of religion to this day. The 
Damaras and Andamanese still guard their tribal blaze in 
communal huts, as the Romans did in their temples two 
thousand years ago. 

As primitive man ate in the warmth of his fire, he would 
sometimes throw into it bones, or the surplus fat of birds, 
beasts, or fish, and so become acquainted with a fiercer fuel 
than wood, one melting at times into oil, which he saw 
burning with much light. To burn fat by itself would 



14 FLAME AND ITS FIRST USES 

mark a further stage of discovery, and so came the first 
lamp, such as flares to-night in the cabins of the Tennessee 
mountains. From deUberately using fat and its oil for 
fuel, there would be an easy transition to trying how other 
oil-like things would burn. In many places petroleum 
oozed to the surface of ponds and creeks, proffering fuel 
by the use of which man's ideas would again be enlarged. 
Familiar with the fact that some things would give out 
heat and light, he would, in lack of such things, or from 
sheer curiosity, try the effect of setting fire to any new 
substance he might find. And so, in the range of his 
attempts, he found that peat, lignite, and coal from seams 
appearing on the surface of the ground, could be added to 
his store of fuels ; and in the procuring of all these he 
would make and use new tools — with further expansion of 
his intelligence. Thus clearly did fire endow early man 
with faculties and facilities for tasks impossible before ; 
bestow upon him the beginnings of comfort and cheer; 
enable him to set out so fast, to separate, finally, so far from 
his cousinry of the glade and thicket, that, until Darwin 
lifted the veil, their family tie lay unrevealed. 

In all the early enjoyment of flame, fear was mingled. 
A gust of wind, a sudden shower, could put the blaze to 

flight, and the log, or coal, or peat, how- 
Fire Kindled Artificially, ever faithfully tended, would sink at last 

to ashes. With keen intelligence, in- 
debted to the lessons of fire, a man may be imagined say- 
ing to himself, in some region of frosty winters : " What 
if I could summon fire when I chose, instead of trying 
with such pains to keep it alive? When flame goes out, 
does it not go somewhere whence I may recall it?" How 
the wistful question prompted its answer is clear. In 
rubbing or grinding a bit of wood into shape for tool 
or weapon it grew warm to the man's touch ; when his 
hand was heavy and quick, the dull heat of friction began 



FIRE CREATED AT LAST 



15 




to pass into something higher; still he persisted, now in 
wondrous hope, and saw the scorching and burning wood 
burst into flame. The blaze, tiny and shrinking as it was, 
had doubtless often shown itself before, but this time it 
was aroused by a savage with 
wit enough to feed it with 
crumbled moss or broken 
bark, and repeat its weird 
creation. When, as in the 
modern practice, a stick was 
swiftly turned in a slot, un- 
der steady pressure, a tiny 
cone of dust would slowly 
gather, smoulder for a few 
moments, and then spring 
into a blaze (Fig. i). 

Stones as well as sticks were 
part of the stock in trade of 
primitive man, and much 
pains did he lavish on his flint 
knives and arrows. The modern Eskimo, almost destitute 
of wood and metal, works wonders with the bone, the hide, 
and the sinews of the seal ; so with the men of the stone 
age, their ingenuity in shaping their axes, hammers, and 
chisels is fairly astonishing. Nor was ornament neglected. 
Professor Petrie has discovered in Egypt ancient imple- 
ments worthy to be credited to a primitive jeweller, so 
delicate is their decoration. Flint is found in many widely 
scattered chalk-beds. In striking one piece of it upon 
another to shape the edge of a weapon or a tool, the stone 
shot out sparks, just as an old-fashioned strike-a-light does 
now (Fig. 2). At a moment memorable in human fortunes, 
some of these sparks fell upon dried leaves, sun-cracked 
pith, or some such fluffy combustible as a cotton- boll or the 
catkin of an arctic willow. A blaze was born, as many 



Fig. I. 

Making fire. TTupa Indians, Call 

fornia. U. S. National Museum. 



i6 



FLAME AND ITS FIRST USES 



another had been born before ; but this time, as with the twin 
flame from wood, it caught the eye of a man capable of that 
faithful imitation of nature in which rests the mastery of 

her. To this hour the 
spark from flint shares with 
the flame from wood the 
whole field of winning fire 
by primitive means. No 
piecemeal acquisition this, 
like learning to hit a mark 
with stone or bolt. The 
dexterity which led up to 
fire-making may have been 
gained by a succession of 
minute steps, each sepa- 
rated from the next by a 
difference scarcely percep- 
tible ; but when dexterity 
rose to the height of kin- 
dling a blaze, it opened on 
that instant a door to a 
whole universe of power beyond the reach of the hand 
of man, however skilled, if fireless. 

As fire passed from its various birthplaces to one new 

zone of the world after another, manifold trials disclosed 

which woods were easiest to kindle. The 

The First Lessons of cottouwood in its Crumbling fibre proved 

Kindled Fire. ^j^g j^gg^ . ^j^g y^^^ afterward adopted for 

the bow, was an excellent fire-bringer; 
in what are now the Southwestern States of the Union, 
the stalk of yucca and agave were employed with equal 
success. The dried root of the cottonwood is used to 
this day by the Moqui Indians because even better than 
its stem. As tinder for the fleeting spark from flint, dried 
fungi and frayed bark of many shrubs and trees approved 




Fig. 2. 
Strike-a-light in Use. 
Museum 



U. S. National 



THE FIRE-DRILL 



17 



themselves, every region rewarding the seeker with its 
peculiar supply, generally abundant. In this service the 
touchwood earned its name ; the cones of larch and pine, 
when slightly charred, were efficient in an uncommon 
degree. 

In the use of all these aids there was wide diversity of 
skill. Fire-getting by the friction of wood to this day 
costs the Ainos more than two hours' severe labor. In 
other tribes this drudgery was long ago abridged by bor- 
rowing a tool from a sister art. A common task for the 
primitive artisan was boring holes in wood, or stone, or 
shell, with sharp flints whose tapering contour foretold both 
awl and chisel. By and by these rude perforators were 
improved in form, and turned with thongs and sinews; 
through point thus meeting point instead of rambling over 
an extended sur- 
face, the heat was 
heightened and 
flame quickly won. 
The drill, in its first 
estate but an au- 
ger, has gone round 
the world an effec- 
tive fire-maker as 
well (Fig. 3). Its 
wieldtr need un- 
dertake no search 
for special kinds of 
wood, nor is it 
necessary that his 
wood be dry ; in- 
deed, Zuni priests, 
to do their gods the more honour, were wont to moisten the 
tree whence they drew the sacrificial blaze. Some savage 
tribes familiar with the fire-drill seldom use it ; the Apaches 




Fig. 3 

Iroquois pump-drill for making iire. Onondaj^J 

Indians, Canada. U. S. National Museum. 



i8 



FLAME AND ITS FIRST USES 



have so much knack in twirHng two simple sticks as to 
educe fire in but eight seconds. 

Nature in showering hints upon inventors has not 
neglected the fire-maker. A suggestion for an original 

mode of fire-making may have lain in 

Fire-kindling by Mod- watchiug bamboo stcms driven against 

em Savages. g^^,j^ other in a storm until flame issued 

from their rasping friction. In the Malay 
Archipelago, says Alfred Russel Wallace, two pieces of 
stem are used to kindle fire ; a sharp-edged piece like a 
knife is rubbed across a convex piece in which a notch is 




Fig. 4. 
Fire-making by sawing. Burmese and Malay method. 

cut, nearly severing the bamboo ; after sawing across for a 
while, the wood is piercedj and the heated particles fall 
below and ignite (Fig. 4). The Ternate Malays and the 
Tungaras of British North Borneo have improved upon 
this by striking a piece of china and a bit of tinder against 
the outside of a piece of bamboo, whose silicious covering 
yields a spark. The Pacific Islanders and the Negritos of 
New Britain make fire on yet another plan — by plough- 
ing. They rub a sharpened piece of hard stick against 
the inside of a bit of dried split bamboo. This produces a 



MEMORIES WHICH REMAIN 



19 



fine dust which soon ignites. The flame is fed with grass. 
Thus everywhere has acquaintance with the uses of fire set 
man to inventing means of creating it, while the process of 
invention has made him famihar with new materials and 
expedients, all with the effect of enlarging his knowledge, 
of promoting the strength and flexibility of his mind. 

From its quickness and convenience the flint method of 
fire-making had only to be discovered, or borrowed, to 
supersede at once the friction- stick or the drill. With the 
conservatism characteristic of religion, the older plan still 
lingers at the altar. Professor Romeyn Hitchcock says 
[United States National Museinn Report, 1887-88, p. 552) : 

The fire-drill is used at the festivals of the Oyashiro to produce fire 
for use in cooking the food offered to the gods. Until the temple was 
examined officially in 1872, the head priest used it for preparing his 
private meals at all times. Since then it has been used only at festivals 
and in the head priest's house on the eve of festivals, when he purifies 
himself for their celebration in the Ijnbidotis, or room for preparmg holy 
fire, where he makes the fire and prepares the food. 

Among the Sacs and Foxes, the juniors resort to the 
white man's matches, the seniors light their pipes with flint 
and steel (Fig. 5), while the 
priests still use the bow-drill. 
The Roman Catholic Church, 
in its blessing of the new fire 
on Easter even, carries us back 
yet farther than to the bow- 
drill. The officiating priest is 
required to strike the spark from 
a stone. 

A long and weary path, with 
many a twist and turning, 
stretches between the men who 




first lighted a fire with flint or 



Fig. 5. 

Flint and steel. Otoe Indians. 

Kansas and Nebraska. 

U. S. National Museum. 



friction-Stick and the men of to-day who strike the cheap 
phosphorus match — perfected as recently as 1840. The 



20 FLAME AND ITS FIRST USES 

later steps in that path have been taken through finding 
substances more and more combustible — first of all, the 
lighter and more resinous woods; then, sulphur; and last 
of all, phosphorus. The shred of pine in the friction-match 
remains as a relic of the fire-stick of the cave-dwellers; it 
recalls the day when our lowly ancestors first dared to 
mimic the sun in an artificial beam of warmth and light. 
And there is more than the match-stick at hand to remind 
us, in the midst of gas-jets and electric lamps, how the first 
gropings to both were assured. In the English village of 
Brandon, on the Little Ouse, thirty miles from Cambridge, 
flints are still being made by knappers of an expertness 
such as comes only by inheritance — in this case, from im- 
memorial times. Many of the flints are still struck off in 
forms closely resembling those of the early stone age.^ 

A century ago Cuvier and his school gave classic form 
to the catastrophic view of nature ; they traced in the 

world of fossil remains abrupt entrances 

A Pace Quickened to and exits ; in many strata of the globe, 

a Leap. whether fossil-bearing or not, they saw 

the work of earthquake and volcano. 
What inference better warranted, at that time of compara- 
tively little knowledge, than that species had been created as 
if by instantaneous fiat ? From this view many naturalists 
of to-day have recoiled so far that they never tire of re- 
peating that nature knows no leaps, no sudden changes. 

But let us recall the day when the sea first washed its 
way across the ridge that ran from Africa to Gibraltar. The 
preparation for that momentous day, the slow encroach- 
ment of the Mediterranean on this strip of land, had occu- 

1 Mr. William Carter, a flint-maker at Brandon, writes (May 6, 1899) : 
" There are now eighteen flint-makers at work here, each of whom makes two 
thousand flints a day. The markets are scattered throughout Africa, China, 
India, Afghanistan, Persia, Russia, Turkey, Norway, and Sweden, where the 
flints are used chiefly for guns. In Spain they are mainly wanted for strike- 
lights." 



NEW BIRTHS OF TIME 21 

pied ages. In all probability, the rising of a storm of 
uncommon violence in a few minutes broke down the sub- 
siding barrier at its weakest point. Then speedily followed 
consequences of life and death to myriads of creatures ; 
uncounted species of molluscs and fish were able to find 
new prey, while their victims were attacked by new foes 
too formidable to be resisted. As the gap between shore 
and shore grew broader, it yawned at last too widely for 
even the most daring swimmers ; carnivorous beasts, thus 
shut in to either Europe or Africa, were exposed to un- 
wonted stresses, while their maraudings, now limited, left 
their former prey on the opposite coast less harried and 
insecure. 

The volcano, much more thoroughly studied now than in 
Cuvier's day, has the same teaching as the sea ; the Sand- 
wich Islands may stand as a type of its creations. For 
ages a huge caldron beneath the Pacific was bu.sy pushing 
up its cubic leagues of rock and earth. One moment this 
mass was below the wave, the next it had emerged to air 
and sunshine. Now birds and insects began to ahght upon 
it; spores and seeds conveyed by them could give birth 
to ferns, shrubs, and trees ; possibilities of life entirely new 
arrived with its simple lift from the deep. The life histo- 
ries of both insects and birds confirm the view that the pace 
of progress may on occasion hasten to a leap. Let us note 
what follows as soon as insects begin to supplant the winds 
at the business of fertilising flowers. Flies and moths 
come to a blossom, attracted by its nectar; their surfaces 
while they feed are brushed by pollen ; away they sail to 
other flowers and tie a marriage knot with a directness 
and efficacy denied to the aimless air. Thus, simply 
through having exteriors which easily catch dust, insects 
of the narrowest intelligence unknowingly become the 
painters, sculptors, and perfumers of unnumbered varieties 
of blossoms. A revolution not less remarkable was 



22 FLAME AND ITS FIRST USES 

wrought when birds first appeared upon earth. In all 
likelihood it was in perfecting the feathered wing that 
their emergence from reptilian stock took place. Even 
the beginnings of flight, accompanied by the heat-retain- 
ing raiment of feathers, would have decisive value. The 
realm of the air with its possibilities of escape from ene- 
mies, its new sources of food, its new breadths of climate, 
stretched itself before the incipient bird. In the struggle 
for life the developing faculty of flight was the resource 
more vital than any other, and therefore the power most 
likely to survive in every favouring variation, with the efifect 
of shortening the period of transition to the new kingdom. 

Not less significant are the " sports " of the botanist, of 
the breeder of sheep and cattle. The Concord grape, seized 
upon for its excellence by Mr. Ephraim W. Bull ; the an- 
con sheep, so short-legged that fences could be safely low- 
ered ; the hornless bull of Paraguay, so much more tractable 
than his sire, all appeared abruptly from ordinary stock, 
and transmitted their characteristics as fully as do com- 
mon fruits, sheep, and cattle. The truth seems to be that 
nature for long periods and wide areas may move with slow 
and steady pace, as if gathering her strength and catching 
her breath ; then, as in the twinkling that divides cloud from 
snow, or a drop of water from its gaseous elements, the mi- 
crometer method ceases to apply, change in degree be- 
comes exalted into a change of kind, and gestation yields 
a life so different from the parent form as to seem a new 
creation. 

Man possessing only such fire as nature gave him, and 
man creating a blaze at will, are separated by all the dis- 
tance between mere warmth and vivid flame, between 
mechanics alone and mechanics plus chemistry. Those 
heroes of invention, whoever they were, who first kindled 
flame, did more for human weal than any of their succes- 
sors in the hierarchy of creative power, for it was their 



THE OFFSPRING OF FIRE 23 

triumph that made possible every other. As we shall see 
when we come to consider the subjugation of electricity, it 
has illustrated once again this swift maturing of an acces- 
sion to the supreme resources of man. Dexterity in one 
decisive epoch flowered into the mastery of fire ; the fruit- 
age of fire made possible the harnessing within a single 
century a force as weighty as itself with benefits for man- 
kind. 



CHAPTER III 

THE FIRST GAINS FROM KINDLED FLAME 



INCALCULABLE were the gains that began to flow in 
upon the first fire-maker, his victory won, its spoils as- 
sured. Beneath his tread the globe expanded itself with 
invitation, for now no longer chained by 
New Horizons for the the sunbcam, he added all the frozen 
Fire-maker. ^^^.^j^ ^^ j^j^ huntiug-ground. The Es- 

kimos, according to Professor Dawkins, 
are the lineal descendants of the cavemen. They are the 
only American aborigines who have invented a lamp ; that 
simple device has enabled them to conquer and hold an 
outpost twenty degrees nearer the pole than any other 
human settlement (Fig. 6). Whether the first explorers 

had caves to fall back upon 
or not, fire was indispen- 
sable to them. A burning 
brand cleared their paths 
through forests otherwise 
impenetrable. When they 
singled out a tree for their 
rude carpentry, it was no 
longer cut down by flints so soon dulled and broken in 
the process. Fire cunningly applied, to be as cunningly 
quenched with wet mud, had a sharper and quicker tooth 

24 




Fig. 6. 

Eskimo lamp from Mackenzie River. 

U. S. National Museum. 



DAY LENGTHENED 25 

than stone. The tree felled, its trunk was softened and 
shaped, again by fire, into a canoe for voyages too daring 
for any raft. 

Yet worthier service lay In lifting the dreary pall of 
night. Until the savage could command fire the clouded 
evening sky left him as if sightless for toil, for sport, for 
escape from ravening beasts and sudden tempests. If his 
feet found a beaten path, it was easy to stray from it in 
darkness, perchance to pay the penalty with his life. His 
lowly hearth, heaped with crackling boughs, cheered even 
more with its light than with its warmth. It drew to its 
rays the industries of flint and needle ; its fitful beam 
created man's first home. What artificial light means as 
an educator we can see in a modern instance. The French 
Canadian habitant forty years ago had nothing better than 
a flickering, malodorous grease-bowl, which hung over his 
table from a notched stick. To-day he has a lamp of kero- 
sene, cheap and briUiant, with its invitation to reading and 
study. 

From the moment when fire first glowed within the walls 
of a dwelling, however lowly, it began to exert an influence 
upon architecture which persists to the present hour. Let 
a Western mining village be swept by flames, and although 
its shanties date back only a few months, their chimneys 
stand unhurt to say, " Build all as soundly as you build us." 
Fire makes demands for permanence and solidity which are 
disregarded at the occupier's peril, at the nation's loss. 
Fire in ancient times had a dignifying effect on the build- 
ings designed to guard the communal flame at which any 
one might light his brand and take it home. These central 
and labour-saving fires, as years went by, took on religious 
associations. It is plausibly argued that as home is chiefly 
the creation of fire, so also is the rearing of temples for 
worship, such as those of Vesta in old Rome, or of the 
modern Parsees in Bombay. 



26 FIRST GAINS FROM KINDLED FLAME 

Thus did flame requite its maker by multiplying his 
opportunities as an explorer, by broadening the zones in 
which he might choose a dwelling-place, 
Cooking. by giving him security and comfort, and 

by so eliciting his skill that that larger 
outer garment — a house — might begin to be rudely fash- 
ioned from its prototypes, the cavern and the tree. Fire 
meant more space to live in, more time to work and play 
in, and better shelter ; it also stood for more and better food. 
The spoils of the hunter or the fisherman broiled or roasted 
became more digestible, or, as pemmican, could be longer 
stored to abridge the see-saw betwixt plenty and want. 
When it was remarked how readily hot stones imparted 
their heat to water, the further art of cooking by boiling 
was approached. To this day the Assiniboines, or stone- 
boilers, of the Canadian Northwest practise the most 
ancient known method of seething. They dig a hole in the 
earth, line it with hide, and fill this with water and meat ; 
hot stones one after another are immersed in the liquid 
until it mounts to a cooking temperature. From a cal- 
dron as crude as this sprang the kettle hollowed from a 
tree or a soft stone, the basket-kettles of closely twisted 
fibre common among many Indian and African tribes, 
wherein water is brought to boiling-heat by the immersion 
of hot stones. 

Having become an adept in this new art, the wife, not 
less adventurous in experiment than her husband, varied 
their repasts, an important matter in savage life when de- 
pendence upon a single kind of food might mean starva- 
tion. She found that plants repulsive in taste, or even 
poisonous, when plucked from the field, needed only boil- 
ing to furnish a wholesome and toothsome dish. The 
squaws of southern California gather several kinds of 
cruciferous plants, throw them into hot water, then rinse 
them out in a stream and use them as food. This boiling 



POTTERY 27 

and rinsing remove juices which have a bitter taste and 
provoke nausea. A New Zealand woman, with a degree 
of temerity hardly to be commended, once ate berries of 
the Laiiriis tawa after boiling them ; she found that the 
fruit had lost its deadly poison in the kettle. Thus un- 
knowingly did she cross the frontier that divides skill cu- 
linary from art medicinal, a feat in which sisters of hers 
throughout the world have long emulated her example. 
Primitive broth-pots, wretched and wasteful as they seem 
to us now, are nevertheless distinguished in their progeny; 
they foreran the stupendous boilers and digesters of modern 
industry, the vast metal chambers which pour out sulphuric 
and nitric acids for the chemist and the electrician. Volta, 
disposing his crown of cups with its corrosive bath, was a 
debtor to the savage who first added a kettle to a grill. 

From those poor hearths of old sprang many of the arts 
which most dignify mankind, each in turn as fecund as its 
parent. The slab on which was laid the 
broiling fish or fowl became the corner- Pottery. 

stone for forge and furnace. Cellini 
moulding his " Perseus and Medusa " of bronze, Bes- 
semer burning out carbon from his iron that steel should 
be left behind, both enjoyed inheritance from the savage 
who first laid a stone before his fire to make its heat more 
serviceable. In those days of small things it would have 
seemed absurd to prophesy that fire should yet make arti- 
ficial stone, and in forms most various, all able to resist 
flame itself. And yet what else is pottery? So various 
have been the earths, salts, and metals which have served 
the potter, so much ingenuity has he displayed in shap- 
ing his wares, so much have they called forth all his skill 
as a decorator and depicter, that the art of the potter 
fills one of the most interesting chapters in human advance, 
and is, indeed, wont to mark an era in the chronicles of 
archaeology. 



28 FIRST GAINS FROM KINDLED FLAME 

For a product so manifold in its kinds as pottery, so 
widely diffused throughout the world, it is probable that 
there were many origins. One of them may have lain in 
noticing that when a hearth had cooled down on clayey 
soil the ground had taken on a useful hardness. Or it 
may be that clay, adhering to boughs or roots as they 
were thrown upon a fire, gave the same priceless hint. 
Again, it may have been in coating a stick with clay and 
thrusting it into a blaze that the first step toward pottery 
was taken. The second step must have been the discovery 
of tempering — that a little sand mixed with clay kept the 
mass from cracking apart. We should remember that in 
making their baskets impervious to water, the early crafts- 
men were taking a long stride toward the skill of the potter. 
To this day, in Arizona the Indians coat their baskets with 
clay and mud to retain liquids. An ingenious theory as to 
the beginnings of pottery was published a hundred years 
ago by M. Coquet. Aware that clay is often daubed on 
wooden pots and kettles as a protection against flame, he 
held that when at last the wood was burned off, the clay 
covering would stand out as a capital vessel by itself. 
It may have been in some such rude way as this that the 
industries which now flourish at Sevres and Worcester first 
took their rise ; and not these only. From primitive wattle 
and daub probably came the art of making bricks and tiles, 
scarcely less useful and beautiful than pottery. Clay is so 
excellent a material for tablets, it is so easily hardened in 
the fire after it has been impressed by the stylus or the 
brush, that both in Assyria and Creece it gives us im- 
perishable records of great civilisations. 

From vessels which could be trusted on the fire, lessons 
of the highest value began to be learned. Water is often 
so scarce to the savage that his wanderings are limited to 
tracts where he may readily find it. We may surmise that 
in times of drought sea-water was, in uncounted cases, 



THE FIRST STEAM-ENGINE 29 

boiled in the attempt to make it drinkable. But the longer 
the boiling the saltier the residue, until at last salt alone 
remained in the pot. Fire had refused 
to do the work required of it, but, in- Aboriginal chemistry 
stead, it had done something better. In ^"'^ Engineering. 
a few hours it had produced precious salt, 
a task for which the sun and wind upon the marshes re- 
quired weeks. But in the first place water had been joined 
to the salt, and whither had it fled in the boiling? A cold 
stick or stone held above the piping pot at once brought 
to view what otherwise seemed annihilated wholly ; and it 
was further noticed that this recovered water was free 
from salt — was pure. A trivial enough experiment, per- 
haps, but it was the starting-point for such great con- 
trivances as the retort, the alembic, and the still, those 
producers of the acids, alcohols, oils, and gases of modern 
industry. 

A notable addition to the pot or kettle was the lid ; it 
kept in the heat, it kept out falling leaves and flying cinders. 
When an abrupt access of 
heat lifted this lid there was 
a demand for employment 
by force out of work which, 
repeated often enough, is- 
sued at length in Hero's 
device of the aeolipile, so in- 
geniously brought down to 
date in the steam-turbine 
of the Hon. C. A. Parsons ,, , * ' 

Hero s seolipile. 

(Fig. 7). The savage, with- 
out being able to philosophise about it, had long with 
flint and fire-stick converted work into heat; it required 
many a toilsome century to reverse the process and 
oblige heat to do mechanical work. When the lesson 
was learned at last, the steam-engineer was glad to profit 




30 FIRST GAINS FROM KINDLED FLAME 

by the knowledge of fuels, of furnace-building, of sub- 
stances that convey heat well or ill, that fire-users began 
to gather long prior to any art of writing. Of those distant 
days we have but the unintended records of forsaken 
hearths, of rusty tools, of heaps of potsherds — relics elo- 
quent of the mountainous debt the present owes the past. 

As epoch-making as the birth of pottery was the union 
of luck and skill — the luck earned by the skill — which 

founded the art of glass-making. Ame- 
Giass-making. thysts, emeralds, garnets, and other gems 

must have been prized from their first 
finding, as much for their transparency as for their hue and 
sparkle. In volcanic streams, then as now, there frequently 
lay masses of obsidian, some of it fairly transparent, and 
readily broken into thin flakes having a razor-like edge 
adapted for spears and arrows. When, in the sheer riot of 
experiment, sand and soda were fused in a blaze which 
mimicked a volcano's heat, by a man shrewd enough to 
repeat the act, there was added to human resources a sub- 
stance of more than golden value. Who shall compute the 
worth of glass for windows, lanterns, lamps, and spectacles ? 
In the telescope and microscope it reveals worlds too re- 
mote or too minute for the unassisted eye ; in the lenses 
of the camera, as we shall presently remark, we obtain a 
secondary and derived vision of every image, be it luminous 
or not, that wings its way through space. One of the first 
services of glass in the electric age was to form the Leyden 
jar and the plates from which frictional electricity streamed 
forth. For the later developments of electric art, the con- 
veyance of currents for the telegraph and for power, glass 
and its next of kin, porcelain, have been invoked for indis- 
pensable aid as insulators. 

Fire to early man had many minor uses, each important 
in its way. As hunter and fisherman he employed it to 
lure his prey, to afi'right beasts to which he himself was 



FIRE AS A LURE 31 

prey, or to yield a protecting veil of smoke against insect 
pests scarcely less to be dreaded. Ernest Ingersoll says: 
" When a savage built a blaze in front 
of his rock shelter it would form an Lures, 

efficient guard from attacks by wild 
beasts ; within a circle of fires a camp of hunters might 
securely rest or sleep. When the camp was left behind 
a fire-brand would be one of the best of weapons, for, 
when sturdily wielded, no animal is able to face it. To 
this day, the flourishing of fire-brands as a defence against 
dangerous animals is common among wild men and hunters 
encamped in savage regions. The ability to set fire to the 
jungle might more rarely be of great service in ridding the 
locality of troublesome brutes. Some quadrupeds, at once 
timid and curious, deer especially, are allured by a light, 
just as are many familiar moths and flies of summer. Deer 
feed and wander mainly at night, or just before dawn, and 
seldom at any other time visit ponds, streams, or water- 
holes of the plains. The hunter who carried a little fire 
in the bow of his canoe, and kept himself wholly out of 
view, could easily paddle within arrow-shot or spear-fling 
of a deer or antelope, which would stand surprised out of 
its natural caution by the strangeness of the floating light. 
This resource of the hunter is so widely practised by ex- 
isting savage races that it probably dates back very far in 
the history of primitive food- getting. As with hunting, 
so with fishing, in both modern and remote times. A 
bright light now serves a double purpose, and may have 
done so long ago. The flare brings to view the bottom 
of the stream, or of the sea at ebb-tide, so that the fisher- 
man, as he floats quietly by, or as he stands upon a steep 
bank or isolated rock, can see to strike at fish whose activity 
is for the most part nocturnal. Moreover, to some fishes, 
and especially to the sturgeon, such a light is an irresistible 
attraction." 



32 FIRST GAINS FROM KINDLED FLAME 

Half-burnt sticks from their first tests had formed tough 
and durable weapons, oftener in demand than the fire- 
brands, their original form. Of aUiance 
Diverse Aid. to the fire-brand there was, in later 
days, a weapon much more terrible. 
When the first colonists came from Europe to America, 
the Indians attacked them with a firearm, where invented 
nobody can tell. This weapon was an arrow to which 
flaming tow was fastened, so as to ignite the wooden 
houses of the settlers. That this strange device may have 
been contrived long before seems probable when we learn 
from Alcedo that the Caribs had a similar weapon. So 
peculiar an invention is likely to have sprung from a single 
mind, and, if so, must have required ages to find its way 
to New England. 

The man of war has often taught a lesson to the man of 
peace. Heavy sticks hardened in fire and drawn over the 
soil, or dragged through it, as in China, were the fore- 
runners of the harrows and ploughs of later agriculture. 
Fire softened the resins, gums, and bitumens which ce- 
mented and adorned primitive boats and tools, such as 
the Eskimos still make. Even the somewhat advanced art 
of annealing was long ago a familiar practice. Obsidian 
buried under embers and allowed to cool with them became 
less brittle for the stress and strain of battle or the chase. 

Fire can preserve as well as destroy. Many ancient 
builders, those of Switzerland in particular, underpinned 
their lake-dwellings with stakes so well charred that they 
have withstood insects and decay for thousands of years. 
At Robenhausen, where excavations have been conducted 
with thoroughness and care, one may see relics of tools, 
bows, and even a last, of wood. It would seem that dur- 
ing recurrent conflagrations, garments of woven cloth, bits 
of dressed leather, and fragments of mills and looms fell 
into the water as the scaffolding gave way, sank into the 



FIRE AS SIGNALLER 33 

mud of the lake, and, because well charred, have remained 
unchanged to the present day. At the National Museum 
in Naples are many relics of Pompeii as overwhelmed by 
Vesuvius in A. D. 79 ; among these are olives, figs, grain, and 
bread, which fire reduced to unalterable form more than 
eighteen centuries ago. 

Fire, from remote times, has been employed to give 
signals, as a means of communicating intelligence. In the 
early days of man as a mariner he erected 

on storm-swept coasts beacons whose a Primitive Telegraph. 

blaze, faithfully tended, gave warning or 
comfort to drifting voyagers, the flickering ray foretelling 
the sunlike beam of Sandy Hook or Skerryvore. As war- 
rior he crowned the highest hills with conspicuous flares to 
voice alarm to scattered allies, prefiguring every modern 
telegraph. The smoke of camps, in its betraying or reas- 
suring wreath, rises higher than fire, and this has been fruit- 
fully observed by savages on opposite sides of the planet. 
The Indians of the plains, as described by Custer, resort to 
the loftiest hills for their signal-stations. There they 
build fires, and by placing an armful of partly green 
grass or weeds over the blaze as if to smother it, a dense 
white smoke is created, which may ascend in a calm atmos- 
phere as a column for hundreds of feet. A current of 
smoke established, the Indian spreads a blanket over the 
smouldering mass so as to confine the smoke for a few 
moments. By rapidly removing the blanket he sets the 
column free, and thus by a succession of cloud-pulses he 
sends up a message which may be discerned as far as 
fifty miles away. The aborigines of Victoria, Australia, 
have a like code of smoke-signals by which they have been 
observed to tell their distant comrades of the capture of a 
whale or the advent of an exploring party. 

Thus even m its aboriginal uses fire in a high degree 
multiplied the resources and powers of man. Its heat 



34 FIRST GAINS FROM KINDLED FLAME 

procured him a rich array of benefits : it unbarred a new- 
breadth of the globe as he wandered forth in search of bet- 
ter dwelHng-places ; it enlarged a dietary which became 
the while more wholesome and appetising ; it gave him the 
wherewithal to become a potter and glass-maker. The 
light which streamed from his blaze was as generous in 
blessings : it made night as day ; it rendered habitable and 
even cheery the caves which otherwise were dark and per- 
ilous dungeons; it served to lure the fish and game upon 
which he subsisted ; it was a means of communicating in- 
telligence as far as the eye could see a bonfire or a pillar 
of smoke. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE MASTERY OF METALS 

IN the fullness of time the fire-user came to a discovery- 
destined to throw all the minor utilities of flame into 
eclipse — a discovery, indeed, only second in dignity to 
that of fire-kindling itself. On the shores 
of Lake Superior, in the Connecticut The Finding of copper. 
Valley, and in many other parts of the 
world, were picked up for their promise of new qualities 
certain heavy stones — nothing else than native copper. 
These masses, treated as if they were ordinary stones like 
the rest, soon displayed properties of a marvellous kind. 
Other stones were easily chipped and broken under the 
hammer; these spread themselves out until they were thin 
enough to be used as knives and chisels, having an edge 
much more lasting than that of flint. More singular still, 
when this red substance was put in the fire, it softened 
so as to yield to the hammer more freely than before ; if 
left still longer in a blaze it melted and ran like so much 
beeswax. 

Here all at once was discovered a new kind of wealth, 
almost as on the memorable day when flame was first inten- 
tionally created. Never yet has man, early or late, come 
into new riches without thinking of new investments; very 
soon copper was shaped into a wide variety of articles, 
their forms borrowed from the knives, chisels, and orna- 

35 



36 THE MASTERY OF METALS 

ments of familiar stone. The metal, however, was scarce, 
and stone plentiful, so that as a material for tools and 
weapons stone long retained its predominance ; it was as 
paving the way to the great achievements of metal- working 
that copper was first important. Fire in the hands of the 
metal-worker has proved itself a multiplier of gifts, a creator 
of powers not less remarkable than in other provinces of 
its rule. 

Copper fortunately occurs not only in masses substan- 
tially pure, but also in carbonates which yield the metal 
at comparatively low temperatures. Mr. James Douglas 
observes that the Indians of Arizona have long used as 
food the unopened interior leaves of the Agave palmer^, or 
mescal, after baking them in hot, stone-lined pits without 
access to air. These pits would readily come to a temper- 
ature high enough to reduce copper from pieces of carbo- 
nate ore common in the region, which might be built into 
the walls of the pits. The accidental discovery of this reduc- 
tion would lead to the practice of copper-smelting.^ 

Another metal, discovered probably as early as copper, 
and, fortunately, in its easily reducible oxide, tinstone, was 
tin. Whether at first copper and tin were found combined 
in an ore, or whether their union came about through ran- 
dom experiment, nobody can say. Tin, poor in itself, when 
joined to copper to form bronze, develops qualities more 
desirable than those of copper alone, tin having the dor- 
mant kind of value that comes out only in a partnership. 
When metals fuse together they dissolve each other in 
ways as yet little understood. The solutions which, when 
cooled to solidity, are called alloys, are riddles as yet 
unread, like many of the kindred solutions which remain 
liquid at ordinary temperatures.^ Bronze is tougher, 

1 Mineral Industry, Vol. Ill, p. 243. 

2 Sir William Roberts-Austen has for years conducted a series of researches 
on the properties of alloys. A remarkable result has followed his applying a 



IRON AND STEEL IN WAR 37 

stronger, more elastic than copper ; It takes a sharper edge 
and keeps it longer; it can be poured into moulds at a 
lower temperature, to come forth a casting fairly true in 
form ; and, what is a matter of moment, all these qualities 
are modified as the proportions of copper and tin are varied. 
Offering this fund of excellence, bronze gave the art of war 
an impulse almost as decisive as that due to gunpowder 
when, in the fourteenth century, it enabled the soldiers of 
Europe to throw away the crossbow. 

At the Conquest by William the Norman, in the eleventh 
century, his army and that of Britain, in point of bravery, 
were equal ; but the soldiers of William 
had an inestimable advantage in the pro- The Metais in war. 
ficiency of their smiths. The Normans 
bore weapons of steel incomparably elastic and strong ; they 
were clad in steel armour from head to foot ; their horses were 
shod with iron shoes. What chance had the Britons, lacking 
as they did this aid from the miner and the craftsman ? In 
prehistoric times it is altogether likely that when the lance 
or sword of copper or bronze first clashed against the cudgel 
of stone, it won victories even more decisive against tribes or 
races not intelligent or fortunate enough to rise to the use of 
the new arms. When, in turn, iron and steel were opposed 
to bronze, there was a repetition of the tragedy by which 
warriors who fell short of a new acquisition were not 
simply vanquished, but, in all likelihood, extirpated — for in 
savage warfare no mercy was shown to the conquered. 

Here we have a probable explanation of the gaps which 
appear in the genealogical trees of many native races. The 
appropriation for the first time of metals as arms, the suc- 
cessive improvements in the treatment of these metals, 

moderate heat in his experiments. On fusing a strip of gold to the base of a lead 
bar, maintained for a month at 250"^ C, well below the melting-point of lead, the 
gold-lead alloy has travelled up to the top of the lead bar, a distance of 2f 
inches. This phenomenon is plainly akin to that of liquid dilTusion. 



38 THE MASTERY OF METALS 

meant making weapons of sharper edge and greater 
strength. This would conduce to the obHteration of tribes 
or even races equipped from the forest or the quarry instead 
of the mine, or wielding arms of bronze against arms of 
steel. Metals as tools meant much ; as weapons they meant 
everything. In the corn-field, the workshop, and the home 
the mastery of metals taught a new deftness, bestowed a 
new opulence ; in the field of war the skill of the sword- 
maker and the armourer stood for victory and life as against 
defeat and extinction. When the archer was swept away 
by the gunner, it was because skill had made for gunpowder 
a metal barrel strong enough to resist extreme pressures. 

For tools no less than for weapons, bronze is almost as 
much to be preferred to copper as copper is preferable to sim- 
ple stone. Especially have axes of bronze 
Metal Tools. played a leading part in the prelude to 

civilisation. Forests fell before them 
which would have forever defied brittle axes of stone — for- 
ests which could not have been safely attacked with the 

firebrand. Professor Dawkins, 
in Early Man in Britain, says : 
'' Under the edge of the bronze axe 
clearings would be rapidly pro- 
duced, pasture and arable land 
would begin to spread over the 
surface of the country. With the 
disappearance of the forest wild 
animals would become scarce, 
hunting would cease to be so im- 
portant, agriculture would im- 
FiG. 8. prove, and a higher civilisation 

Primitive bronze horn, Swe- inevitably follow." Bronze sickles 
den. U.S. National Museum. ^^^^^ -^ ^_^^^^^ V>x\^^m, and more 

abundantly in Switzerland and Savoy, testify that the 
alloy was early impressed into the service of husbandry. 




IRON AS CHIEF 39 

In its Egyptian varieties bronze is as hard as steel, furnish- 
ing tools almost indestructible. From its beauty the com- 
pound metal gave opportunity to decorative as well as to 
useful art. Ancient horns and bracelets of bronze would 
do credit to modern workshops (Fig. 8). Why, it may be 
asked, have comparatively so few objects in copper been 
transmitted to us from the long interval between the age of 
stone and the age of bronze ? The probable explanation 
is that most articles of copper were sent to the melting- 
pot as soon as the better qualities of bronze were under- 
stood. 

But as bronze had displaced copper, so it in turn was to 
meet a supplanter. How or when iron was discovered it 
is idle to conjecture. From its compara- 
tive purity in meteorites it is thought that iron, 
they were the earliest sources of it; to 
this day the Eskimos derive their iron from meteoric 
masses. Nickel, often borne in meteorites, has been de- 
tected in many ancient articles of iron. In the Mesabi 
Range of Lake Superior, iron ore is torn from the hills 
much as if it were the material for common macadam ; in 
many other quarters of the world it is almost as plentiful. 
With fireplaces taking on somewhat the shape and char- 
acter of furnaces, with fuels better chosen, with hollow 
reeds or fans to blow an artificial breeze, it was inevitable 
that one day ironstone should be thrown into a flame hot 
enough to free the iron from its ore. In Africa easily 
reduced ores are still worked by the simplest means ; 
Africa, indeed, from its wealth in such ores, may well have 
been the scene of the first iron-working. 

The new metal soon proved itself worth all the trouble 
of its production. It was stronger than bronze, more 
elastic, and in the form of steel took a keener edge. When 
heated to whiteness two pieces could easily be welded with 
the hammer, so that long rods or lances could be made 



40 THE MASTERY OF METALS 

from it. What was decisive in the matter, however, was 
the profusion of ironstone in contrast with the rarity of 
copper, either native or in ores. In his first small experi- 
ments it is unlikely that the primitive iron-maker needed a 
flux ; as his operations grew bolder, this would cease to be 
the case. So various in composition are the minerals con- 
taining iron, so diverse the means required for the release 
of this metal, that the iron- master must soon have become a 
man with a wide outlook on the resources of»nature. Only 
by repeated experiments, persisted in despite failure after 
failure, could he have learned what to add to his ore, so that 
its undesired elements might be drunk up and flow freely 
away. Before such a flux as limestone could be lighted 
upon, thousands of other substances must have been 
thrown in the fire, only to declare themselves inert or 
harmful. There must surely have been a long series of 
trials, conducted with high sagacity, before the efficacy of 
fuel itself in ridding metals of worthless mixtures could 
have been ascertained. Indeed, when we consider the 
skill of the old-time metallurgist, it is hard to believe that 
he was destitute of some pretty clear perception of law 
beneath apparent lawlessness. Be that as it may, the age 
of science owes much to the patience which would shoot so 
many arrows at a venture, content if in a lifetime one of 
them struck its mark. 

During all the years when copper and iron were gradually 
surrendering themselves to man, other metals were coming 

to his knowledge. We may believe, 
steel. from its occurrence in native purity, that 

gold may have been worked even earher 
than copper; its beauty, its freedom from, rust, its superb 
malleability, would commend it to every intelligent tribe 
lucky enough to find it. Lead must have been known 
early in the day of metal-working, from the comparatively 
low temperature which reduces it from its ores. Then, 



GIFTS OF STEEL 41 

at periods wholly beyond guessing, silver and zinc were 
found and used. But as time goes on, iron confirms 
rather than relaxes its long supremacy. Transformed into 
steel by adding a few tenths of one per cent, of carbon, it 
makes possible the cheap railroad and steamship ; it builds 
the machines and enginery that do more and more of the 
drudgery of civilised nations ; it is fast revolutionising the 
architecture of great cities, following its re-creation of the 
tunnel and the bridge. 

It is because steel combines strength and lightness in 
the highest degree that we find an office building reared 
to thirty stories, that an ocean steamer exceeds a length 
of 700 feet. Engines, locomotives, and machinery are 
built to-day in dimensions and whirled at velocities that 
would have made the mechanics of the last generation 
stand aghast, and this while every working part is more 
durable than ever. So greatly is the strength of steel aug- 
mented by modern processes of manufacture that wire is 
now produced which sustains a load of 170 tons per square 
inch. No single cause has contributed more to the cheap- 
ening of freights than the building railroads of steel in- 
stead of iron. In one case steel rails have remained in 
use seventeen years, and borne more than 50,000,000 tons 
of traffic, with a loss of but 5 pounds of metal to the yard, 
and this while safety and speed have been much increased. 
To-day locomotives are constructed of steel so that they 
can go farther and quicker than ever before with the mini- 
mum of repairs. Freight-cars also are built of steel, so 
that they carry heavier loads proportionately to their weight 
than do wooden cars. The result is that a train now bears 
thrice as much freight as a similar train did twenty years 
ago, and charges have fallen to a point so low that the 
policy of maintaining canals is questioned by some of the 
most judicious minds in the business world. 

Steel, itself a compound or an alloy, is commingled with 



42 THE MASTERY OF METALS 

nickel and other metals with astonishing gains in its best 
properties of toughness and strength. Hence the unending 
competition between shot and armour-plate, the one no 
sooner advancing to a new power of penetration than the 
other rises to a new resistance. Shot is now made capable 
of piercing 37 inches of wrought-iron, the point of the shot 
remaining intact, although the striking velocity is nearly 
2800 feet a second. Certain nickel-steels studied by 
Guillaume seem to contravene all the rules one is accus- 
tomed to associate with metals or alloys : some of them do 
not expand with heat ; others contract with heat and expand 
with cold. The magnetic susceptibility of both iron and 
steel disappears on the addition of either manganese or 
palladium — a fact of high importance to men as far apart 
as the ship-builder and the watchmaker. When the dream 
of the aeronaut is fulfilled and he reigns in the sky at last, 
it will be largely through steel, or one of its compounds, 
providing him with a structure which unites the utmost 
tensile strength with the least possible weight. 

On its commercial side the expansion of the iron industry 
is one of the wonders of our era. A furnace at Pittsburg 
swallows 250 tons of ironstone at a single charge. From 
Lake Superior ports were shipped, in 1899, cargoes of iron 
ore amounting in the aggregate to 17,901,358 tons. 
The United States now leads the world in its production 
of iron and steel. In Alabama, rich veins of iron ore and 
of coal for its reduction lie so close together that three 
pounds of pig-iron were, in 1897, sold for one cent. 

" Startling as the statement may seem," says Sir William 
Roberts- Austen, ** the destinies of England throughout the 
nineteenth century, and especially during the latter half of 
it, have been mainly influenced by the use of steel. Her 
steel rails seldom contain more than one-half per cent, of car- 
bon. Her ship-plates, on which her strength as a maritime 
power depends, contain less than half that amount. . . . 



NEW ECONOMIES 43 

Passing now to questions bearing upon molecular activity, 
we are still confronted with the marvel that a few tenths 
per cent, of carbon is the main factor in determining the 
properties of steel. We are therefore still repeating the 
question, How does the carbon act? which was raised by 
Bergman at the end of the eighteenth century. That 
mystery is lessened now, as it is known that the mode of 
existence of carbon in iron follows the law of ordinary 
saline solution." ^ 

One of the great inventions of the primeval mechanic 
was the wheel, which originated probably in the section of 
a round tree, such as the birch, used as a roller. When a 
wooden wheel was strengthened and smoothed by a metal 
tire, its friction was as much diminished as when the drag- 
ging of a load on the ground was eased by placing a 
roller beneath it. An advance almost as important is en- 
joyed to-day as hardened steel is worked up into roller- and 
ball-bearings. These appliances, supplanting plain axle- 
bearings, reduce friction to the vanishing-point in bicycles, 
elevators, propeher-shafts, machines and engines of all 
sorts. 

The art of modern metallurgy centres in the production 
of iron and steel ; other metals are produced all the better 
and cheaper for the lessons the Iron- 
master has taught his brethren. Espe- Lessons from the 

daily Important to the whole guild of iron-master, 

metallurgists is the steady reduction in 
the amount of fuel needed to yield a ton of pig-iron; to- 
day not more than 40 per cent, as much coke Is required 
as when small and unimproved furnaces were employed. 
A remarkable economy has been effected here by the hot 
blast, devised by Neilson. He observed that the first work 
that fuel had to do was to heat the air for Its own combus- 
tion ; thought he, " If the air enters the fire already heated, 

1 Presidential address, Iron and Steel Institute, May, 1890 



44 THE MASTERY OF METALS 

the resulting temperature will be much higher than it is 
now, and much more effective — for it is the range of heat 
above the melting-point of the metal that really does the 
business." Experiment proved him right, and paved the 
way for Sir William Siemens's regenerative furnace. 

This is so contrived that the hot gases resulting from 
combustion are led through roundabout chambers of brick 
which absorb their heat ; at intervals these chambers are 
closed to the gases and opened to the air on its way to 
the furnace — which air is thus raised to a high temperature 
with no outlay for fuel. The apparatus is double, its halves 
alternating in their absorption and surrender of heat. Mr. 
Charles Kirchhoff, in analysing the cost of producing iron 
in an establishment at Pittsburg, found that the consump- 
tion of coke had been reduced 14 per cent, in the decade 
ending with 1897. ^^ smelting and refining lead on an 
extensive scale in a Western city during the same period, 
the consumption of fuel declined 29 per cent. From year 
to year the furnaces have been improved so as to smelt 
with profit charges successively poorer and poorer in metal. 
Previous to 1890, 10 per cent, of lead was considered the 
minirrtum for satisfactory results, but, since then, ores con- 
taining as little as 6 per cent, of metal have been found 
rich enough to repay the smelter and refiner.-^ 

The recent enormous expansion of electrical industries 
has given an unexampled impetus to the metallurgy of 
copper. Mr. James Douglas, president of the Copper 
Queen Consolidated Mining Company, of New York and 
Arizona, states (June 19, 1899): ** The influence of iron 
metallurgy on the treatment of copper has been very 
marked. The hot blast has not been generally applied, 
owing to the mixed character of the usual charge, and to 
the corrosive action of the gases, which require working 
with an open top. But where high furnaces smelt a uniform 

1 Transactions American Institute Mining Engineers, 1899. 



OAK AND IRON IN CONTRAST 45 

ore, and the gases are not very sulphuretted, as at Mansfeld 
in Germany, hot-blast stoves like those attached to iron fur- 
naces are used. The Bessemer converter is almost every- 
where employed to concentrate matte to metallic copper. 
The form of apparatus is that applied in steel metallurgy, 
but the converter is lined with slag-making ingredients and 
is more rapidly corroded than the gannister of the steel 
converter." 

Let us for a moment try to place ourselves at the dawn 
of metallurgy, an industry once so limited, now so stupen- 
dous. Let us think, if we can, what it 
meant to have acquired metal as a ma- The Debt to Metais. 
terial instead of wood or stone. Our first 
contrast may be of oak with iron. Oak may be readily 
cut, sawn, and planed, while its lightness adapts it for 
buildings, furniture, or for the handles of tools and weap- 
ons. But, Hke other wood, it warps with moisture, in 
the tropics it is the prey of ants and other voracious 
insects, a fire of low temperature will consume it, and it 
will soon crumble to decay in exposed situations. It has 
strength, but not enough to serve as a knife or a bolt. 
Its elasticity is of limited range, so that a bow of oak may 
easily be snapped if overstrained by an archer. Mark 
now the qualities of iron : it is vastly stronger, tougher, 
more elastic, than oak. Fire of low temperature plays round 
it and works no ill. Not only is iron better where oak is 
good, but it has properties not enjoyed by wood of any 
kind : it may be melted and poured into moulds, beaten and 
rolled into sheets, or drawn into delicate wire. Paint easily 
prevents it from rusting. Alloy iron with a little carbon 
and straightway it is improved in its best qualities, as cop- 
per is when joined to tin. In its unapproached capacity 
for magnetism iron is the core of modern electric art — as 
we shall duly note. 

Contrast, next, sandstone with iron as a material for the 



46 THE MASTERY OF METALS 

craftsman. Sandstone is readily cut and carved with the 
chisel, but it is comparatively weak and brittle. It is su- 
perior to nearly every other stone in its resistance to fire, 
but it has little elasticity, so that, except to support weight, 
where bulk is admissible or desirable, as in building, it has 
no great worth. Or, if instead of sandstone we take flint, 
a mineral which has done so much good work in the world, 
we find that, although its keen edge may be quickly formed, 
this stone has little cohesion, is brittle, and has therefore 
but slight durability. In no region of art do we find the 
wizardry of fire more striking than here : it renders obso- 
lete many materials which once were indispensable ; it 
creates implements of a size and strength impossible 
before the use of iron and steel. Metals in comparison 
with any other raw material of the arts have the supreme 
advantage of combining rigidity and elasticity, while they 
are at the same time plastic enough to be shaped with the 
punch and hammer. Toil multiplied its rewards a hundred- 
fold when it rose to the use of metals, it easily surmounted 
difficulties not to be faced before metals were shaped and 
moulded. Their forms of use and beauty range all the way 
from the soup-kettle to a filigree brooch such as the silver- 
smiths of Genoa are busy making to-day. 

While art took on new refinements as its materials were 
refined, the kindling of fire came to its utmost elegance at 
the hands of the metal-worker. At the annual festival of 
Raymi, the Aztec priests were wont to collect the rays of 
the sun by a concave mirror of metal, so as to inflame a 
heap of dried cotton. From yet another quarter did fire 
create a novel means of its own reproduction — when the 
burning-glass bade sunshine ignite fuel for the hearth. 

Let us cast a glance at eras much remoter than the times 
when skill had risen to the making of mirrors and lenses. 
Day by day, as the primitive metal-worker was adding to 
his stock and store through the capabilities of his servant, 



METALS AS TEACHERS 47 

fire, the man himself grew richer and richer. While the 
things he could find or make by the aid of fiame were in 
so many directions multiplied, equally increased were his 
own perceptions and thinking powers. His eye, as it 
ranged new ground, became alert for the lustre or the 
stains that betokened useful ores. His touch learned how 
to choose the best stones and clays for furnace and furnace- 
bed, the loam for moulds ; it took on accuracy as it brought 
to truth the edge of bronze knives and sickles or chisels of 
tempered steel, it became refined and deft as it hammered, 
bent, twisted, and drew copper, gold, and iron. If a fuel 
was reluctant in burning, if a metal for the tenth or the twen- 
tieth time eluded his effort to free it from its ore, so much 
the more was his ingenuity spurred and strengthened for 
eventual success. 

His brain, endowed with knowledge of hundreds of new 
substances, many of them his own creations, enriched by 
all the tasks his hands had learned, grew strangely resource- 
ful, so that when a new want arose he was apt with a 
response to it. His world had widened throughout the 
whole round of its horizon; his sway over that world 
already bore the promise of kingship since fulfilled. Man 
dependent on such fire as nature might perchance bestow, 
and man kindling fire at will, are as creeping babe and 
sturdy youth. In that youth of the race were sown the 
seeds of skill which have since flowered in the mechanic 
and the mechanician, in the artisan and the artist, in the 
observer and the explorer, who by subtlest indirection bring 
within the narrow scope of sight and hearing a universe 
otherwise unseen and silent. When dexterity rose to the 
point of making fire it enlarged the sphere for its further 
exercise by nothing short of a celestial diameter. 



CHAPTER V 

MOTIVE POWER FROM FIRE 

WE have seen how metals in their earhest uses were 
formed into tools of new strength and wearing 
quality, inciting their possessors to tasks impossible before. 

Without metals, at once strong, durable, 
Steam-engines. and rcsistant to flame as wood and stone 

are not, there could have been no ad- 
vance from tools to machines, nor from machines to the 
engines which automatically drive them — all with vast 
multiplication of the fruits of human toil. But long be- 
fore this employment of metals for the alleviation of human 
drudgery there had been a noteworthy escape from the 
severest burdens of labour. 

Any survey, however rapid, of the advances of man since 
the ages when he dwelt in trees or caves, must pause to 
consider his weighty debt to the brutes he tamed or yoked 
to his service. The domestication of animals probably 
began with the capture of young wolves and sheep, 
oxen and horses, at first rather for amusement than use. 
Rich were the rewards of the men intelligent and forbear- 
ing enough to rear these creatures — for now they enjoyed 
new sources of food-supply, new aids in the chase, fresh 
materials for clothing, and, in the case of draught-animals, 
much exhausting labour was transferred to the muscles of 
horses and oxen. For ages all the way down to three 

48 



WATT AND HIS FORERUNNERS 49 

centuries ago, man never seems to have suspected that the 
fuels, which did so much work for him in the forge and 
furnace, were able to pass to the field and there tire out 
the most powerful beasts ever harnessed : the identity of 
heat and mechanical power lay hidden from his eyes. 

Although the aeolipile of Hero was rotated by steam 
two thousand years ago by the same force that twirls the 
familiar fountains of to-day, there is no proof that Hero's 
device was applied to serious work, or followed by contri- 
vances of higher efficiency (Fig. 7). A water-pump with its 
cylindrical barrel and moving piston is an old invention, 
and probably suggested the first form of the steam-engine. 
That rude apparatus was a cyhnder partly filled with water 
and placed directly on a fire. As steam was generated the 
piston rose and did work; when it had arrived at the end 
of its journey the cylinder was cooled by dashing water 
upon it, and the heating and hfting process was slowly 
repeated. Newcomen effected a decided improvement by 
throwing a jet of cold water into the cylinder; Watt did 
still better when he took the steam, after it had lifted the 
piston, to a separate condenser permanently kept cool by 
a stream of water. He thus economised heat and increased 
the efficiency of the engine in a remarkable degree. 
Provided with this improved engine, the manufacturer and 
the miner passed at a bound from a petty to a huge scale 
of operations; the modern revolution of industry, with its 
factory system and its subdivision of labour, dates from the 
great saving of fuel effected in the engine of Watt. 

He was fully aware that a further saving lay in the use 
of high pressures, but he had not boilers strong enough, 
cylinders true enough, nor pistons sufficiently tight for 
steam much beyond atmospheric pressure. As boiler- 
makers and engine-builders have grown more and more 
expert, have brought new lathes and tools of precision to 
their aid, steam pressures have constantly risen beyond the 



50 MOTIVE POWER FROM FIRE 

low range possible to Watt. Of late years the movement 
in this direction has been rapid. Whereas in 1880 marine 
engines rarely ran with pressures exceeding 75 pounds to 
the square inch, to-day a pressure of 150 to 200 pounds is 
common. Steam at 200 pounds needs but little more heat 
for its production than steam at 75 pounds, yet nearly 
double the duty may be had from it. Professor Thurston 
formulates the rule that the working value of steam in- 
creases as the square root of increase in pressure, so that 
the use of steam at 400 pounds means getting twice as 
much motive power as at 100 pounds. Strange to say, the 
higher pressure costs only one thirty-fourth more heat 
than the lower. 

In improving the design of steam-engines, not less than 
in bettering their furnaces and boilers, the principal part 
has been played aboard ship. The mariner of old was 
probably the first man to turn to account the force of the 
winds. When the mariner of to-day furls his sails for good 
and all it is because he succeeds in getting more work out 
of coal than anybody else. When a factory engine can be 
so improved as to save 100 tons of coal a year, its owner 
increases his profits by the cost of so much fuel. With a 
like amelioration of a marine engine its owner saves not 
only in his coal bill, but he has gained more room for 
cargo. This is the premium which has developed at sea 
the utmost economies of design and operation, so as to 
make the marine type of engine a model to be copied on 
land. Within the past decade the Atlantic has been virtu- 
ally bridged by a fleet of freight-vessels running at a cost 
so low as to bring the wheat-fields of Minnesota and 
Dakota to the neighbourhood of Liverpool and London. 
No wonder that the British farmer in his distress turns to 
fruit-growing and dairying! 

Beginning chiefly with engines of marine type, there 
has been within the past fifty years a close and critical 



SUPERHEATING AND COMPOUNDING 51 



study of every source of loss, with exhaustive tests of 
improved modes of construction and working. As steam 
expands in a cylinder it chills itself, and imparts a chill to 
the metal of which the cylinder is built, so that the next 
charge of steam, as it enters, is cooled so much as to lose 
in extreme cases fully 40 per cent, of its working value. 
An important remedy for this evil is to maintain the tem- 
perature of the cylinder by a jacket of hot steam. 
Two other effective plans consist in superheating and in 
compounding. A superheater is a series of tubes exposed 
to the furnace gases, and so placed that the steam passes 
through it on its way from the boiler to the engine. When 
steam not in contact with water is thus raised in tempera- 
ture it is no longer liable to condensation in a working 
cylinder. In compound engines economy is introduced 
from a new quarter. 
Two, three, or even 
four cylinders receive 
the steam in turn ; 
because the chill due 
to expansion takes 
place, not in one cyl- 
inder, but in two or 
more, this chill is 
spread over two or 
more surfaces instead 
of over one surface, 
and, thus subdivided. Fig. 9. 

it can be effectively Westinghouse single-acting compound engine, 
offset by thorough ^, hi^h-pressure cylinder ; ^, low- 

•^ ^ pressure cylinder. 

jacketing. Com- 

pounding has also advantages from a mechanical point of 
view which commend it to the builders of large engines as- 
signed, as in pumping, to constant duty (Fig. 9). 

Let two remarkable feats in American and Gfirman 




52 MOTIVE POWER FROM FIRE 

steam-engineering be adduced: Professor Thurston, ad- 
dressing the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 
New York, December 6, 1899, stated that a Hall & Treat 
quadruple-expansion engine using steam at 400 pounds 
pressure, had developed a horse-power on 9.67 pounds of 
steam per hour. This displays a conversion into work of 
25.08 per cent, of the heat value of the steam supplied. 
In a Schmidt compound engine at Cassel, Germany, of 750 
indicated horse-power, the steam is superheated 150^ C. 
Its ** economiser " uses the same distilled water over and 
over again, the exhaust steam being used to heat the 
stream just before it reenters the boiler. This engine boasts 
the lowest consumption of steam on record — 8f pounds per 
indicated horse-power.^ Its efficiency is no less than 27.4 
per cent, of the heat value of the steam employed. Oper- 
ated with coal of high grade, and under the best conditions, 
a large boiler of the Babcock & Wilcox type will generate 
9.78 pounds of steam of 200 pounds pressure from one 
pound of fuel, imparting to its water and steam three 
quarters of the total heat of the furnace. It is therefore 
clear that the engineer's long-cherished desire to obtain a 
horse-power for an hour from a pound of coal is gratified at 
last, and it seems improbable that the piston steam-engine 
will be much improved during the twentieth century. In- 
crease of pressure is accompanied by such heightening of 
temperature that lubricating oils are volatilised, not to 
speak of the redoubled hazards of leakage and explosion. 
Having well-nigh exhausted the possibilities of invention 
in one path, the engineer turns to another. 

The latest form of steam-engine recalls the first. The 
steam-turbines of De Laval and of Parsons turn on the 
same principle as the asolipile of Hero. That simple con- 
trivance was a metallic globe, mounted on axes, and fur- 
nished through one of its trunnions with steam from a 

1 Engineering, London, December l6 and 23, 1898. 



THE STEAM-TURBINE 53 

boiler near by (Fig. 7). As steam rushed out from two 
nozzles diametrically opposite to each other, and at tan- 
gents to the globe, there resulted from the 
relieved pressure a swift rotation which The steam-turbine, 
might have done useful work. Indeed, 
if Hero had been able to use high-pressure steam, and 
had had metal strong enough to withstand the tremen- 
dous bursting tendency of great speeds, he would have 
had a steam-engine as efficient as many which still linger 
in the smaller and older factories of America. Hero's 
device had inherent excellence in its continuous rotation 
— decidedly preferable to a piston motion that^may re- 
verse its direction several times in a second. In order to 
return to this primitive merit it was necessary to gain skill 
and insight by advancing through a succession of intricate 
devices ; a labyrinth brought the investigator at last to a 
height from which he could clearly discern an escape to 
economy. Before the steam-turbine could be invented, 
metallurgists and mechanics had to become skilful enough 
to provide machinery which may with safety rotate 10,000 
times in a minute: Watt had to invent the separate con- 
denser; means had to be devised for the thorough expan- 
sion of high-pressure steam ; and the crude device of 
Hero had to be supplanted by wheels suggested by the 
water-turbine. 

The feature which gives the Parsons steam-turbine Its 
distinction is the ingenious method by which its steam is 
used expansively. In a piston-engine the cylinder is filled 
to one-twelfth or one-fifteenth of its capacity with high- 
pressure steam, when communication with the boiler is cut 
off; during the remainder of its stroke the piston is urged 
solely by the steam's elasticity. In the Parsons turbine, by 
arranging what is practically a series of wheels on the same 
shaft, the steam passes from one wheel to the next, and 
at each wheel parts with only a fraction of its pressure 




54 > MOTIVE POWER FROM FIRE 

and velocity (Fig. lo). The illustration shows the arrange- 
ment of moving-blades and guide-vanes, the top outer 
cover of the case having been removed. The revolving 
barrel has keyed into its curve the moving-blades. The 

end of one row of the 
guide-blades can be seen 
in the sketch, though not 
very plainly. Between 
each two rings of moving- 
blades there is a ring of 
guide-blades, these latter 
Fi<^- 10. being keyed into the 

Moving-blades and guide-vanes of the containing-cylinder. In 

Parsons steam-turbine, . , . 

workmg, steam is admit- 
ted into the narrow space between the barrel and the case, 
and is directed by the first ring of fixed guide-blades in a 
direction spiral to the axis of the revolving barrel. The 
steam next comes in contact with a ring of revolving 
blades on the barrel. These are set at an angle so that 
the steam acts on them as wind on the sails of a windmill, 
causing the barrel to revolve. A further set of fixed guide- 
vanes rotates the flow of steam, and then another set of 
revolving vanes is impinged upon, and so on from admis- 
sion to exhaust. In this way moderate pressures are ob- 
tained, and the turbine may be directly coupled to a 
dynamo, a fan, or a pump. 

The locomotive engine was born in the coal-mine. It 
was because coal-wagons had long been drawn upon pairs 

of iron rails that at last similar rails were 

The Locomotive and laid abovc ground, so that horses might 

Steamship. g^ faster and with larger loads than upon 

macadam, however good. When the 
steam-engine proved itself so much better and cheaper than 
horses in turning the shafts of spindles and looms, it was 
asked, Why not put this machinery on wheels moved by 



A MILE IN 38 SECONDS 55 

itself, and see if it will not be cheaper and quicker than trac- 
tion by horses ? The experiment was tried by one inventor 
after another, and with fair success, but for a signal triumph, 
which for good and all should dismiss the horse from long- 
distance travel, there was needed a genius cast in the large 
mould of George Stephenson. 

He built for the famous competition at Rainhill, October 
8, 1829, a locomotive which far excelled its rivals. The 
Rocket won its victory by its inventor's adoption of two 
capital devices : first, small copper tubing for the boiler, 
which had the effect of greatly increasing the effec- 
tiveness of the fuel; second, a blast of exhaust-steam for 
his chimney, which intensified the furnace draught. The 
Rocket with its water — carried in a cask — weighed but 
4 J tons ; it drew « in its wagons 1 3 tons of freight ; and 
although its average pace was but 15 miles an hour, it 
made one spurt at the rate of 29. Here at last was a 
practical locomotive, lacking nothing except to perfect the 
details of its design and construction. At a bound the 
civilised races of mankind passed from dependence on the 
postilion to reliance on the engineer. For all purposes of 
communication, whether of things, persons, or ideas, it was 
as if the planet had that day shrunk to one-fourth its 
former dimensions. A passenger locomotive built at the 
Baldwin Works, Philadelphia, has travelled a mile in 38 
seconds; a giant engine from the same factory weighs 112J 
tons, and draws on a level stretch of track no less than 
5000 tons of freight (Fig. 11). In its latest and best 
models the engine due to Stephenson embodies the prin- 
ciple of multiple expansion, with the result that it holds 
the field somewhat stubbornly against the electric locomo- 
tive that fain would displace it. 

Scarcely less important than the locomotive in making 
the world one parish is the steamboat, and its ally, the 
steamship. It was the second year of the nineteenth cen- 



56 MOTIVE POWER FROM FIRE 

tury when the Charlotte Dundas of WiUiam Symington 
sped its way through the Forth and Clyde Canal. Its 
whole bulk is to-day far exceeded by that of the machinery 
which drives an ocean greyhound from Southampton to 
New York. The Parsons steam-turbine on board ship 
has exceeded its performances on land. The Turbinia, a 
torpedo-boat of 44J tons displacement, 100 feet in 
length, and 9 feet in beam, driven by this turbine, has con- 
sumed but 14J pounds of steam an hour per indicated 
horse-power. The Viper, a torpedo-boat destroyer of 
325 tons, and provided with a turbine capable of develop- 
ing as much as 12,000 horse-power, ran at the rate of 37 
knots in a rough sea during her trial trip in November, 
1899. Mr. Parsons states that a cruiser furnished with a 
similar motor of the utmost capacity could steam economi- 
cally at 16 knots an hour, and on emergency treble this 
speed for three hours, or m.aintain the gait of 45 knots for 
eight hours. The tactical value of such a vessel to a 
squadron in time of war is obvious. 

It is probable that the next advance in the speed of 
ocean travel will be due to building steamers exclusively 
for passengers, relegating the carriage of freight to vessels 
much less rapid and costly. The builders of the Turbinia 
have prepared designs for an ocean liner of 600 feet in 
length, of 18,000 tons displacement, and of 38,000 indi- 
cated horse-power. Her ocean speed is estimated at 26 
knots an hour; her total engine-room weight would be 
reduced to about one-half that of ordinary engines, while 
there would be, it is claimed, a small reduction in steam 
consumption to the credit of the new motors. 

In both its stationary and marine designs, the steam- 
turbine marks a distinct advance upon the piston-engine.. 
It weighs less, it occupies less room, it costs less at first 
and for attendance and repairs, it asks for no expensive 
foundations as it does not require to be bolted down. 




Fig. II. 

Baldwin locomotive, built for the Lehigh Valley R. R. Co. 

Weight, 225,000 pounds. 





«MI 


j^i^ 


H0HHK9y^^HHr*^f^^St ^ 






\'r :.rir 


i 


H 


SI.JJ.:.— 



Fic. 12. 

Westinghouse-Parsons turbo-alternator. 

50G horse-power capacity at 125 pounds steam-pressure condensing; 3600 

revolutions per minute. 



DISTANCE OBLITERATED 57 

Because no lubricant enters its steam-space, the exhaust is 
free from oil, much to the benefit of both the boiler and 
the condenser. A ship driven by a turbine is much freer 
from vibration than if a piston-engine were employed. 
Let the steam-turbine on land or water give as much 
power from a pound of coal as a compound piston-engine, 
and it will soon have the field to itself (Fig. 12). 

Proficiency in the use of fire in metal-working has ad- 
vanced side by side with proficiency in the application of 
fire as the motive power for transporta- 
tion. The national aspects of the two, National Aspects of 

as to-day they mutually aid and pro- Modem Locomotion, 
mote each other, was touched upon in 
an address by Mr. James Douglas, delivered as president 
to the American Institute of Mining Engineers, San Fran- 
cisco, September 25, 1899: 

This obliteration of distances by steam-power has altered com- 
pletely the social conditions of the country. Before the railroad 
and steamboat wrought the industrial unification of the conti- 
nent, not only were food and clothes the product of local and 
domestic manufacture, but such a necessary article as iron was 
cast in small furnaces or reduced in small bloomeries, wherever 
iron ore and charcoal were found in even limited quantities near 
a water-power. To transport either fuel or ore any distance over 
bad country roads to large establishments was less economical than 
running the village furnace or forge. In 1840, therefore, the fur- 
naces, bloomeries, and forges were scattered over the land to the 
very outskirts of civilisation in Michigan and Wiscon.sin. Soon 
after that date commenced the concentration of raw material and 
the shifting of the centres of the iron industry to a few favoured 
localities. The process has continued ever since, to the serious 
detriment and even destruction of some of the older mining and 
metallurgical districts, while prosperous communities have- been 
created in what a generation or two ago was an inaccessible wil- 
derne.ss. Ore and fuel need no longer be in natural juxtaposition, 
for ore from the Mesabi Range can be transported 50 miles by 
railroad, transferred to a vessel for a trip of 800 miles by water, 
re-transferred to cars for a further journey of 80 miles, and deliv- 
ered at so low a figure at Pittsburg that steel rails made from it 
by the aid of mechanical appliances have been sold at $17 per 



58 



MOTIVE POWER FROM FIRE 



ton. It is less than a generation ago that Bessemer rails made by 
the same process, but out of costHer ores and by cruder appli- 
ances, cost $120. In very truth, so obedient have the forces of 
nature become to the will of man that weights and distances that 
in the days of manual labour and horse-cartage were controlling 
considerations, are being almost eliminated from the calculations 
of modern engineers. 

During 1898 Great Britain consumed 76,000,000 tons of 
coal in the production of power for industrial purposes. 
During the same period, the United 
Economy in Details. States, in all llkelihood, burned one-third 
more. No wonder that of late years 
the time-honoured agencies for the production of steam- 
power have been sternly catechised as to their perform- 
ance of duty, and have been quickly cast aside as 
more efficient rivals have appeared. Improvements in 
detail began, indeed, long ago. At first, just as in a com- 
mon cook-stove, the steam-boiler stood quite outside the 
fire. A long stride ahead was taken when the fire was 

put inside the boiler, 
^%\(C(. first in a single flue 

in the Cornish type, 
and then in two flues 
in the Lancashire 
type (Fig. 13). If 
two flues were better 
than one because they 
extended the surface 
at which flame could 
do work, would it not 
be still better to mul- 
tiply the two into scores? Flues were multiplied accord- 
ingly and reduced to the small dimensions famiHar to the 
present hour in the boilers of locomotives. Because the 
tubes were narrow they brought a new advantage : they 
could safely be made thinner than large flues or big 




Fig. 13. ■ 
Lancashire boiler. 



WATER, NOT FIRE, IN TUBES 59 




boilers, and so heat could pass through them more easily. 
With this benefit, however, there came a serious draw- 
back. Soot and ashes are apt to gather inside a fire-tube 
and seriously interfere with its heat- _-^_ rf.-. 

ing power. " The remedy for this is 
ingenious enough : the tubes, in- 
clined in position, are filled with 
water instead of fire, and are put in 
the hottest part of the furnace. Of 
course, soot and ashes collect upon them there, but never 
to so formidable a degree as within the body of fire-tubes, 
and always so as to be readily removable (Fig. 14). The 
water-tubes are connected with a boiler, reduced in size, 
which serves as a reservoir for both water and steam (Fig. 15). 



rire in Tube. Water inTube. 
Fig. 14. 




Fig. 15. 
Babcock & "Wilcox water-tube boiler. 

As in many diverse industries, we here can note how 
advance in one application of fire promotes economy in 
another. In the construction of the modern boiler there 
is great advantage in the adoption of steel, which is so 
strong as to be available in thinner sheets and tubes than 
the wrought-iron originally employed. Beyond this gain 



6o MOTIVE POWER FROM FIRE 

there is further benefit at hand. Mr. A. F. Yarrow, the 
eminent builder, stated before the British Institution of 
Naval Architects, July 21, 1899, as the results of experi- 
ments, that nickel-steel containing 20 to 25 per cent, of 
nickel is much longer lived than the mild steel in ordinary 
use. The alloy resists corrosion almost thrice as well as 
mild steel, and deteriorates only one-half as much from 
the action of gases and steam. Stronger materials mean 
bigger boilers and engines. The New York Gas, Electric 
Light, Heat and Power Company is installing in its new 
station at the foot of East Thirty-ninth Street a generating 
plant designed by the company's constructing engineer, Mr. 
John Van Vleck. Each of the sixteen engines to be em- 
ployed will be of 5200 horse-power, working up to 8000. 
With such dimensions arrive new economies. If the de- 
signer sticks to the same forms he finds that the contents of 
a boiler and the power of an engine increase as the cube of 
their lengths, while the surfaces injuriously cooled by radi- 
ation and conduction increase only as the square of these 
lengths. To take a simple case : an enlargement to 
doubled size signifies eightfold increase of capacity or 
power, and but fourfold augmentation of surface.^ 

Economy, instead of waste, appears in other directions. 
The air on its way to the furnace is now warmed through 
a considerable range of temperature by being exposed in 
pipes to the heated gases as they enter the chimney from 
the fire. The heat thus intercepted was formerly thrown 
away. Of course, this interception adds a little to the 
resistance encountered by the chimney gases as they es- 
cape to the outer air. Here, too, improvement is the order 
of the day. The modern builder, instead of designing a 
tall chimney of the old pattern, which by its long column of 

1 The law of volumes and surfaces here concerned is developed and illus- 
trated in A Class in Geometry^ by George lies. New York and Chicago, 
E. L. Kellogg & Co. 



HIGH CHIMNEYS DISAPPEARING 61 

heated air created a draught, to-day erects a low chimney 
and employs a fan to produce a draught, which is much 
preferable. In the first place, it is most wasteful to warm 
air simply for the current which heat sets up in it; a similar 
current can be furnished with a mere fraction of the same 
heat applied to a steam-engine driving a blower. Mechan- 
ical draught has many advantages : it not only dispenses 
with high and costly chimneys, but it is easily controlled in 
bad weather, or when there is an unusual demand for power ; 
it enables both boiler and engine to be reduced in dimen- 
sions ; inferior fuels of low cost are readily consumed; it 
prevents smoke ; and on shipboard, as elsewhere, it lends 
itself to thorough ventilation. 

For a good many years mechanical stokers have been 
devised in various forms ; they are steadily coming into 
favour in improved and economical types, completing the 
modernisation of fuel-burning, and abolishing a most op- 
pressive form of drudgery. As the automatic hopper, 
filled with fine coal, glides to and fro above a furnace pro- 
vided with moving grate-bars, we behold the latest term 
of that marvellous advance which began when the savage 
first laboriously kindled a blaze to warm his hands or to 
cook his breakfast. 

For twenty years, or thereabout, the steam-engine has 
been confronted with a rival in the form of the gas-engine, 
for centuries prophesied in the common 
gun. In the gun a charge of powder The Gas-engine, 
takes fire and is for the most part sud- 
denly transformed into gases of enormous tension. The 
gunpowder is at once the fuel and the expanding medium 
whose motion wings the bullet. In effect, therefore, the 
gun-barrel is both a furnace and a cylinder; the bullet is 
virtually a piston driven with an efficiency far exceeding 
that of any other form of heat-engine. The gas-engine, at 
moderate and safe pressures, copies all this. Within its 



62 MOTIVE POWER FROM FIRE 

cylinder the gas is both fuel and expanding agent. Because 
it has no special furnace or boiler its construction and work- 
ing are much simpler than those of the ordinary steam- 
engine. In its recent and much improved forms the 
gas-engine has been built in sizes capable of exerting 750 
horse-power. For the same quantity of applied heat it 
yields more work than the ordinary steam-engine, but as gas 
usually costs more than other fuel, the balance of advan- 
tage remains in most cases with the older apparatus. 
Machines for generating fuel-gas from coal have been 
designed by Dowson, Benier, Taylor, and others ; when 
operations are on a large scale their use is decidedly gain- 
ful. At Jersey City the Erie Railroad Company installed 
at its shops, during the summer of 1899, ^ Taylor producer 
gas plant designed and built by R. D. Wood & Co. 
of Philadelphia. This plant records the consumption of 
but I.I pounds of rice coal, of low price, per horse-power 
hour, while the average duty of the engines is 22 per cent, 
of the theoretical value of the fuel consumed.^ 

The constant improvement of the gas-engine and the 
gas-producer does not mean the supersedure of the steam- 
engine, but only that the engineer has a new choice in the 
production of motive power ; he may have preferences, but 
no exclusions. Where he has work to do on a small scale, 
or of an intermittent character, he may find it better to 
buy illuminating-gas for use in his cylinders, than to keep 
up steam in a boiler called upon during only a fraction of 
the day. Often, too, the availability of exhaust-steam for 
heating a building, as is often required in the Northern 
States and Canada, turns the scale in favour of a steam 
plant of familiar type. Each case has to be studied in the 
light of its peculiar circumstances. 

In one important department the gas-engine is creating 
a field for itself — by working with gases formerly thrown 

'^ Engineering and Mining Journal, November 4, 1899. 



PROFIT INSTEAD OF LOSS 63 

wastefully into the air. In iron-making there is a huge 
output of blast-furnace gases now beginning to be utilised 
for the production of power at nominal cost. Experiments 
at the Cockerill Works, Seraing, Belgium, prove that the 
heavier particles of dust carried in the gases are quickly 
deposited by a simple arrangement of passages and collect- 
ing-chambers. There remains only a light, impalpable 
dust, which goes through the engines so rapidly as to do 
no harm whatever. 

When a savage softened or melted a lump of copper in a 
blaze, his act was one of direction rather than of execution ; 
to have warmed the metal by repeated 
blows would have been a toilsome and ^j^^ Growth of 
unrewarded task, while to place the cop- initiative, 

per in the flame and duly to remove it, 
was labour of an unexacting and most fruitful kind. So, too, 
when heat-engines of constantly improved types came into 
the mines, the shops and factories of the world, and were 
last of all adapted to transportation, the work that a 
skilful man could direct became immensely greater and 
bolder than the task he could perform by dint of exerting 
his own muscles. In this passing to more and more of 
initiative consists an important phase of civilisation, as we 
shall perceive in future chapters no less clearly than here. 

As heat-engines of one type and another grow in econ- 
omy, each adapted to the circumstances of its case, by just 
so much do they maintain their ground against water- 
powers, except when these are easily available and con- 
stant. Fuels, for a reason which will be manifest as we 
proceed, seem to be destined long to retain their predom- 
inance as sources of motive power. Every improvement, 
therefore, in heat-engines is of prime importance to the 
electrician, whose labours we shall presently consider ; it is 
commonly with the production of motive power that his 
tasks begin. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE BANISHMENT OF HEAT 

WE have thus far considered the gifts of fire as directly 
applied to warming a habitation, to boiling a kettle 
or a still, to yielding light, in fusing metals, in smelting 

their ores, in propelling machinery. We 
Heat Produces Cold, are now briefly to glance at the skill 

which builds an apparatus, and dividing 
the heat within it into two parts, obliges one of these parts 
to expel the other. In this remarkable branch of art, the 
most striking, and perhaps the final, developments have 
taken place within recent months, but the first steps were 
familiar enough centuries ago. 

It is altogether likely that in the day of Columbusice formed 
on peaks such as those of the Sierra Nevada, near Granada 
in Spain, would be carried to the sweltering valley beneath, 
for the refreshment of king and court. Here would come 
into play the virtues of non-conductors such as gypsum or 
ashes — the very material that would preserve the heat of 
an ember prolonging the life of an ice-block. Whether 
heat is to be kept in or kept out, a non-conducting cloak is 
of equal service. Few capitals have so happy a site as 
Granada, and, therefore, other means of lowering high 
temperatures than by ice have been in request from re- 
mote antiquity. Of these means the commonest has been 
the mimic breeze blown by slaves toiling at huge fans or 

64 



THE CHILL OF EVAPORATION 65 

overhead curtains, as in modern India. Here, for all who 
cared to think about it, was a hint as to the equivalence of 
hard work with an effect on temperature. Here, also, 
was a plain lesson that to promote evaporation from the 
skin, or other surface, is to produce a cooling effect. 

Usually there is a flow of heat from surrounding bodies 
to a liquid as it evaporates at nearly the temperature of 
common air, and when the evaporation is slow this cool- 
ing is not readily detected. But when the evaporation is 
rapid, and the body from which it takes place is isolated, 
it is easy to remark a decided fall in temperature. If 
a porous jar filled with water is hung by a thread in a 
quick draught of air, the heat demanded by the evapo- 
rating process is withdrawn solely from the jar, which 
accordingly soon exhibits a chill. Indeed, the familiar 
misfortune of ''catching cold" in a similar draught has 
points of resemblance to the elaborate artificial refrigera- 
tion which to-day yields ice by the car-load. 

All liquids at all temperatures tend to evaporate, and the 
search of the investigator has been directed to ascertaining 
which liquids evaporate most rapidly. 

Among these is alcohol. If a few drops The Evaporation of 

are allowed to fall on the hand they Liquids, 

turn to vapour so quickly as to excite a 
sensation of cold, giving us our first lesson in the refriger- 
ating value of such a liquid when free to change to vapour. 
If alcohol cost as little as water, and if its fumes were not 
inflammable, it would be a capital refrigerating medium. 
But anhydrous ammonia is, from every point of view, the 
most preferable of all liquids as a means of procuring 
artificial cold. It tends to evaporate so rapidly at common 
atmospheric pressure that it quickly chills itself in the pro- 
cess. Of course this evaporation is swifter still when an 
exhausting-pump reduces the atmospheric pressure; and 
quite as important is the fact that, at comparatively mod- 



66 



THE BANISHMENT OF HEAT 



erate pressures, this ammonia vapour is readily reduced to 
the Hquid form once more. A simple refrigerating ap- 
paratus is shown in Fig. i6. It consists in a steam-engine, 
Cy whose first business is to reduce the pressure from the 




Fig. i6. 

Refrigerator, Frick Co., Waynesboro, Pa. 

A^ ammonia; B, brine ; C, engine, by turns exhauster and condenser. 

surface of the Hquid ammonia A. The resulting chill of 
rapid evaporation is communicated to B, a tank filled with 
brine — which remains liquid at temperatures below the 
freezing-point of water. Pans of water exposed to pipes 
of chilled brine are readily congealed to ice. As the sec- 
ond half of its recurrent task the steam-engine withdraws 
the ammonia vapour to a chamber of its own, where it is 
compressed again to liquidity and returned to its original 
reservoir, care being taken that the heat generated in this 
compression is carried off by water flowing over the appa- 
ratus. 

Thus, since heat is transformable into motive power, and 
motive power can force ammonia to chill itself, a ton of coal, 
according to quality, can make six to ten tons of ice in 
competition with the frosts of winter. Because their prod- 
uct is pure, refrigerating-machines are finding more and 
more favour in cities once supplied exclusively with ice from 



COLD HAS HIGH VALUE 67 

ponds and streams. At another point does art here super- 
sede nature. The ammonia-machine stands for the type 
of apparatus which depends upon the evaporation of 
liquids low in boiling-point, the process usually taking 
place in a receiver exhausted as thoroughly as possible. 

Cold, so singular an issue of heat, has high commercial 
value. Apples and grapes harvested in September and 
October are sent from the cold-storage 
warehouse to the table in perfect order The Market vaiue 
as late as May. The fruit-grower and °^ ^°^'^- 

the dairyman have a new opportunity to 
choose the time for marketing their products. Refrigei-- 
ator steamships now carry Canadian butter and New 
Zealand meat in vast quantities to the markets of Great 
Britain. Within the shorter distances traversed by the 
railroads of the United States, the strawberries of Oregon 
find their way unbruised and fresh to St. Paul and Chicago, 
while the kitchen-gardeners of Florida and Louisiana look 
for their customers in New England and New York. There 
is more in all this than the mere purveying of luxuries : there 
is an increase of individual health and strength when a 
national bill of fare is at once diversified and made more 
wholesome. Whereas heat in the hands of early man 
served to multiply his foods . by primitive methods of 
roasting, of smoking, of preservation in grease, — as pem- 
mican, — the later applications of heat by the modern en- 
gineer are of comparable service in multiplying the food 
resources of the civilised world. Cold storage and quick 
transportation supplement in remarkable fashion every 
device that has sprung from the aboriginal grill and kettle. 

Refrigerating machinery bids fair before many years to 
add still other blessings to those we owe to steam. What 
is to prevent the cooling of summer air in dwellings, offices, 
and stores by apparatus sending currents of cold water 
through pipes such as we fill with hot water in winter? 



68 THE BANISHMENT OF HEAT 

Of course, the details of service would have to be totally- 
reversed — the current starting from the top of a building 
instead of from the basement, the coils being fastened to 
the ceiling in place of to the floor. 

The cold required in the cold-storage room is usually a 
degree or two above the freezing-point of water. A much 
lower temperature displays effects un- 
New Depressions of kuowu till withiu the past dccadc. We 
Temperature. havc obscrvcd how ammouia, as used in 
ice-making, is readily brought from the 
gaseous to the liquid form under pressure. Other com- 
pounds there are which demand for the same transforma- 
tion lower temperatures and severer pressures; and these 
when allowed to evaporate freely become chilled in extraor- 
dinary degrees. And here we come to one of the parti- 
tion-walls that have been pierced by the modern physicist, 
with new proof that the realm of nature is one and con- 
tinuous, however convenient it may be to imagine fences 
here and there so as to divide her territory into governable 
provinces. A century ago it seemed that aeriform bodies 
might with propriety be divided into two quite distinct 
classes — vapours, such as steam, and gases, such as oxygen. 
Faraday did much to correct this assumption : he showed 
that carbonic dioxide, chlorine, and many other gases are 
condensable into liquids; but nitrogen, oxygen, and hydro- 
gen resisted his utmost skill. 

A new distinction was thus introduced — between gases 
condensable and gases "permanent." We are now to 
observe the steps by which it is proved that no gas is 
permanent, that no line of demarcation can be drawn be- 
tween such a vapour as common steam and so resistant a 
gas as hydrogen. This gas, together with oxygen and 
nitrogen, are indeed nothing else than the vapours of liquids 
which boil at extremely low temperatures, and which 
solidify at temperatures a little lower. The mind is ac- 



OXYGEN LIQUEFIED 69 

customed to associate boiling, as in the case of water, with 
a considerable degree of heat; we have to pause a moment 
to comprehend that the boiling of liquid oxygen, nitrogen, 
and hydrogen takes place at temperatures compared with 
which those of the arctic circle are torrid. The feat of 
producing hydrogen in solid form marks the highest 
triumph of experimental resources, and has been arrived 
at only through a patient series of approaches. 

In preliminary investigations it was found that ammonia 
at a pressure of 1 15 atmospheres boils at — 33° C. ; nitrous 
oxide, at a pressure of 75 atmospheres, boils at —87° C. ; 
and ethylene, at a pressure of 5 1 atmospheres, boils at 
— 102° C. Here the man of experiment is at once a chem- 
ist and a mechanic ; his chemical compounds enable him to 
descend from one level of refrigeration to a lower one, 
while, from first to last, it is of vital importance that his 
cylinders be of the utmost strength, and his pistons tight 
and true. In this difficult field M. Cailletet of Chatillon- 
sur-Seine, in 1877, succeeded in liquefying oxygen and 
carbonic monoxide. Three weeks later, by a distinct appa- 
ratus, M. Pictet of Genev^a liquefied oxygen. Six years 
afterward MM. Wroblewski and Olsewski of Cracow, by 
original methods, liquefied oxygen, nitrogen, and carbonic 
monoxide. Clearly there is more than one point of attack 
in reducing to liquid form the gases long deemed ** per- 
manent." Each successive experiment but serves to 
verify the dictum of Faraday and Andrews to the ef- 
fect that no matter how severe the pressure to which a 
gas is subjected, that pressure will not avail for its lique- 
faction unless its temperature is lowered to a ** critical " 
degree. 

The most remarkable recent work in refrigeration is 
that of Professor James Dewar, of the Royal Institution 
in London. The feat of liquefying oxygen by a succes- 
sion of approaches to its critical temperature has been 



70 THE BANISHMENT OF HEAT 

thus described by him, in an interview which appeared in 
McClure's Magazine, November, 1893 • 

The process of liquefying oxygen, briefly speaking, is this : Into 
the outer chamber of that double compressor I introduce, through 
a pipe, liquid nitrous oxide gas, under a pressure of about 1400 
pounds to the square inch. I then allow it to evaporate rapidly, 
and thus obtain a temperature around the inner chamber of 
— 90° C. Into this cooled inner chamber I introduce hquid 
ethylene, which is a gas at ordinary temperatures, under a 
pressure of 1800 pounds to the square inch. When the inner 
chamber is full of ethylene, its rapid evaporation under exhaustion 
reduces the temperature to — 145° C. Running through this 
inner chamber is a tube contaming oxygen gas under a pressure 
of 750 pounds to the square inch. The critical point of oxygen 
gas — that is, the point above which no amount of pressure will 
reduce it to a liquid — is — 115° C, but this pressure, at the tem- 
perature of — 145^ C, is amply sufficient to cause it to liquefy 
rapidly. 

In May, 1898, Professor Dewar, by the use of Hquid 
oxygen, succeeded in liquefying hydrogen, producing a 
liquid having but one-fourteenth the specific gravity of 
water; this exploit brought him within 21° of the abso- 
lute zero of centigrade. He afterward reduced the liquid 
to solid form, attaining a temperature estimated at four 
to five degrees lower. Faraday and other investigators 
of an earlier day surmised that hydrogen, when solidified, 
would prove to be a metal ; now that the feat of solidifica- 
tion has been accomplished, hydrogen astonishes the phys- 
icist by displaying itself as non-metallic. 

In feats much less audacious, refrigeration manifests 

itself every day in our mines and quarries. We have 

already glanced at ice-making as due to 

Air Compressed, then the spontancous evaporation of a liquid. 

Expanded. such as ammouia, of low boiling-point. 

Let us now look at the drills of the 

miner and the quarryman as driven by compressed air. 

At headquarters, air for their supply is compressed to a 



THE CHILL OF EXPANDING AIR 71 



Fig. 17. 
A, air at ordinary pres- 
sure ; B, air heated by 
compression ; C, air then 
cooled by expansion. 



pressure of 200 pounds to the square inch, or thereabout. 
In the process there is a marked evolution of heat — which 
is carried off by a stream of water surrounding the air- 
pipes. As the compressed air expands in driving its 
pistons, it falls so much in tem- 
perature that it would be easy to 
freeze water by its means. This 
chill of expanding air as it pushes 
a piston is one and the same with 
the lowering of temperature in a 
steam-cylinder as its contents im- 
pel the piston of an engine. The 
heat which in each case disappears 
is precisely equal to the amount 
which the piston-stroke would gen- 
erate, were it employed, let us say, 
in rubbing iron plates together (Fig. 

•7). 

We are here observing the conversion of heat motion 
into mechanical motion ; it is very much as if we beheld a 
target moving before a storm of fine shot. Heat consists 
in the motion of molecules, and as they part with much of 
their momentum in the act of impelling a heavy piston, 
their loss of motion is declared in their perceptible fall in 
temperature. When a compressed-air motor is at work 
this fall of temperature is evident to the touch ; in the case 
of a working steam-cylinder the effect requires a ther- 
mometer for its detection, since the steam even when low- 
ered in temperature is still very hot. The cooling effect 
derivable from the expansion of compressed air underlies 
the self-intensifying process of refrigeration now to be de- 
scribed. 

In many of its chapters, the history of invention displays 
an advance from the roundabout to the direct, as we have 
seen in the substitution of the steam-turbine for the com- 



72 THE BANISHMENT OF HEAT 

pound engine. Recent modes of refrigeration offer a like 
illustration. For some years the plan was to employ a 
series of chemical compounds, each with 
Liquid Air. a lowcr boiling-point than its predeces- 

sor in the process, and all troublesome 
and hazardous in manipulation. A better method has 
been developed by keeping to simple air from first to 
last, as in the apparatus of Dr. Linde, of Dr. Hampson, 
and of Mr. Charles E. Tripler. 

As the Tripler machine does its work on a bolder scale 
than either of the others, let its operation be briefly out- 
lined : Air is first compressed to 65 pounds pressure to 
the square inch ; through a second pump this pressure is 
exalted to 400 pounds, and with a third pump the pressure 
is carried to 2500 pounds. After each compression the 
air flows through jacketed pipes, where it is cooled by a 
stream of water. At the third condensation a valve, the 
secret of whose construction Mr. Tripler keeps to himself, 
permits part of the compressed air to flow into a pipe sur- 
rounding the tube through which the remainder is flowing. 
This act of expansion severely chills the imprisoned air, 
which at last discharges itself in Hquid form — much as 
water does from an ordinary city faucet. 

It has been said that Professor Dewar, in producing liquid 
hydrogen, has come within 21° of the absolute zero of 
temperature. It may be asked. How 
Absolute Zero. do physicists know where to place this 
point in their scale? The answer is 
that all gases are doubled in elastic force when, without 
change of volume, their temperature is increased from o^ to 
273° C. Assuming the same lawto hold good from 0° down- 
ward, — that for every degree of refrigeration we diminish 
its elastic force, or the molecular motion which produces 
it, by 27-3 of what it possesses at 0°, — then at a tempera- 
ture of 273° below zero the gas would cease to have any 



THE WONDERS OF EXTREME COLD 73 

elastic force whatever. The motion to which elastic force 
is due having vanished, we reach what is called the abso- 
lute zero of temperature. We have withdrawn from the 
gas just as much heat as we added to it when we warmed 
it from 0° to 273°. 

Degree for degree the deprivation of heat works changes 
more remarkable than does addition of heat within familiar 
bounds. When a substance is once 
warmed to the gaseous state, we may Discoveries. 

heat it as much as we please, it remains 
gaseous still. But when a gas or vapour is so cool as to be 
near condensation into liquid form, the change wrought by 
a moderate degree of refrigeration is very marked, and a 
totally new series of properties rises to view ; with another 
and still moderate cooling, the substance becomes a solid 
displaying a totally novel aspect from the mechanical and 
physical standpoints. The difference between a gas at 
low temperature and the same gas highly heated is a differ- 
ence of degree ; tfie distinction between a gas, a liquid, and 
a solid is a distinction of kind. 

The alterations of quality which display themselves 
under the new refrigeration are most significant. Iron, in 
falling from 100° C. to the temperature of liquid air, 
— 191°, gains fifteen times in electrical conductivity; hence 
it is beheved that at absolute zero, iron and other metals 
would be perfect conductors. Professor Elihu Thomson 
thinks that it may be profitable to employ intense cold as a 
means of increasing the efficiency of electrical transmission 
to long distances. Why not also in improving the economy 
of dynamos and motors, advantaged as these are by com- 
pact shape? Carbon is a singular exception to the general 
rule that cold increases conductivity; at extremely low 
temperatures its resistance is extreme, and steadily dimin- 
ishes as its temperature rises. Subjected to the new re- 
frigeration, lead gains enormously in tenacity, ice becomes 



74 THE BANISHMENT OF HEAT 

brittle, and photographic effects slow down and all but 
cease ; alcohol, chloroform, and other important com- 
pounds become solid, and in so doing rid themselves of 
admixtures. 

A wide variety of substances change colour when reduced 
from glowing heat to common temperatures, the metals, 
notably. Just as decided is the change of hue when many 
chemical compounds are brought from ordinary tempera- 
tures to extreme cold. Red oxide of mercury turns yel- 
low, sulphur and potassium bichromate turn white. A 
solution of iodine in alcohol becomes colourless; so does 
ferric chloride, which is a deep red under ordinary circum- 
stances. A new chapter in the story of heat is thus being 
written day by day, and one of the most astonishing, be- 
cause until within a few years the appliances for the for- 
cible expulsion of heat were not perfected. 

A thought often in the mind of Professor J. Clerk- 
Maxwell was the " cross-fertilisation of the sciences." 
He was wont to point out how a new 
Unexpected Aid. discovcry or invention bore fruit in the 
most unexpected quarters, and gave aid 
in emergencies that would seem without hope. Who at 
first view would suppose that the new extremes of cold 
would afford the closest known approach to a perfect 
vacuum? Yet such is the fact, with all 
that it means for the advancement of in- 
candescent lighting and other branches of 
Fig. i8 electric art. By dipping the end of a 

Vacuum obtained by closed bulb filled with air into liquid hy- 
freezing air by drogen, the air is quickly condensed at 

liquid hydrogen. ^^^ ^^^^^^ .^ ^^y^^ ^^^^ ^p.^ ^g^^ ^^^ 

bulb is so shaped that this condensation takes place in a 
detachable part, B ; sealed off by the flame of a blow-pipe, 
at iV, the remainder of the bulb furnishes a vacuum which 
is so nearly perfect that an electrical charge cannot pass 




DISTILLING BELOW ZERO 75 

through it. This nearest of all approaches to complete 
exhaustion is due to the skill of Professor Dewar. A bulb 
thus emptied by utmost cold is an example among thou- 
sands that troop before the observer, all disclosing the 
threads which bind utilities, apparently, at the first thought, 
too remote from each other for any alliance. It is these 
cases which bring permutation from the clouds of mathe- 
matical theory to the solid earth of scientific evidence. 

In another unlooked-for affiliation an old use of heat 
teaches a lesson to the new extreme of cold. For ages 
the chemist has employed fractional distillation as one of 
his most useful methods. To take a modern instance : 
Petroleum, as it flows from a well, is slowly raised in tem- 
perature until the lightest of its naphthas is driven off by 
heat. When that operation is at an end, the temperature 
is slowly raised a little more, then another naphtha, not 
quite so volatile as the first, is separated, and so on with a 
succession of hydrocarbons till at last a heavy oil, useful, 
perhaps, as a lubricant for heated machinery, remains alone 
in the still. Who at the first blush would suppose that 
such a process as this would bear a hint for Mr. Tripler, 
working as he does at ultra-arctic temperatures? But so 
it is. The gases on which he exerts his skill have their 
boiling-points just as oils and water have theirs, and by 
carefully graduating his temperatures he can effect separa- 
tions every whit as important as those by the old-time frac- 
tional still. The boiling-point of nitrogen is about 7^ 
C. below that of oxygen. When liquid air stands in a 
trough and is slowly raised in temperature, its nitrogen 
becomes gaseous first, leaving behind it a mixture which 
from moment to moment grows richer in oxygen — a sub- 
stance of especial value in the arts when it can be secured 
by itself, or with small admixture. On the same principle, 
Professor Ramsay has performed an astonishing feat : from 
a vessel containing a liquid mostly argon he has obtained 



76 THE BANISHMENT OF HEAT 

two new elements, neon and xenon, which, from their 
higher boiHng-points, successively remained behind after 
the argon had evaporated. 

Alloys, so puzzling in other of their properties, do not 
improve in electrical conductivity under refrigeration in 
anything like the same measure as 
Anomalies. simple mctals. At this point a con- 

trast is suggested between the studies of 
the man of science and those of the man of law. Juris- 
prudence in its consideration of the conflict of laws has 
a department of more than common interest to the layman. 
A citizen of Kansas, let us suppose, is permitted by a 
United States statute to do a certain act, while a law of 
his own State forbids him to do it under penalty. From 
this may issue a prolonged contest, simply because the 
legislators of the nation and those of the State have not 
worked in harmony — because the laws of one, or both, do 
not express justice. 

The man of science, like the man of law, has brought 
before him many an anomaly; but, unlike the judge or the 
advocate, he knows that the contradictions he studies are 
only such in seeming: he feels confident that nature at the 
core is in agreement with herself. Any day, he believes, 
these apparent contradictions may be resolved into cases 
of detected law, not simple- enough to disclose itself 
to aught but the most rigorous analysis. In the realm of 
heat it seems that certain rules of radiation, conduction, 
boiling-points, and the like, are general, not universal. In 
most cases they act as if alone ; in a few cases their effect 
is masked by causes as yet not understood. Let a few 
cases as perplexing as that of the alloys under refrigera- 
tion be recounted : Common solder has a lower melting- 
point than any of its ingredients. Sulphur fuses at 120^ 
C, and thickens again at 220° C. When steel is heated 
and dipped into cold water it is hardened ; the same treat- 



COLD AS VALUABLE AS HEAT 77 

ment softens copper. While almost every substance ex- 
pands with heat, rubber shrinks. In most cases electrical 
conductivity is impaired by increase of temperature, yet 
a carbon pencil rises to an almost threefold augmentation 
of conductivity when brought to incandescence in an elec- 
tric lamp. We may be well assured that when these 
anomalies are resolved the explanations will bear in their 
train other difficulties for research yet more subtile. Science 
never does worthier work than where, as here, she points 
to her own unfinished walls, and bids the student as 
a privilege and a duty to supply their gaps as best he 
may. 

Incalculable as the value of heat is in its uncounted 
direct applications, it is quite within the bounds of proba- 
bility that many of these uses are soon 
to be paralleled or outdone by the very The Profit of 

banishment of heat. Within limits long Subtraction, 

ago compassed, cold suspends the chem- 
ical changes which mean the decay of foods, the deteri- 
oration of oils or of many other compounds important in 
the arts. In its new and extreme degrees, refrigeration 
brings to the liquid and even to the solid form some of the 
prime elements of chemical industry. When oxygen, ni- 
trogen, and hydrogen can be produced, shipped, and 
manipulated in as compact form as so much petroleum, 
and almost with the same ease and safety, a new era 
dawns m the laboratory and the workshop. So singular 
are the changes of properties which come about in extreme 
refrigeration, so unexpected are its disclosures, that the 
man of research has now in his hands a power every whit 
as fruitful as if he had discovered some method of heating 
his furnace to a new intensity. 

And all this is not without precedent in other fields. 
Air is indispensable in almost every task of the mechanic 
and the chemist, but mark the value of the means whereby 



78 



THE BANISHMENT OF HEAT 



air may be banished from a boiler or a still — affording a 
new range of working to the refiner of sugar, oil, or alcohol. 
On a vacuum approximately perfect turns, as we 
shall presently see, the success of an important 
branch of electric lighting. In the insulation 
from heat of vessels containing frozen hydrogen 
and similar elements, the chief part is played by a 
vacuum, between the container and an outer shell, 
both of glass ; in the absence of air or other gases 
there are no currents to convey heat from the 
shell to the vessel separated from it by an inch 
or two of empty space (Fig. 19). 

And to pass from the phenomena of heat to 
those of light, to what do we owe the whole 
world of colour but to the power by which surfaces select 
from white light certain of its component rays, reflecting 
the remainder to the eye? Every tint and hue of the 
chromatic scale is a gift of subtraction. 




CHAPTER VII 

THE HIGHER TEACHINGS OF FIRE 

WHILE fire has been multiplying its material gifts to 
man, it has created uncounted objects for his high- 
est curiosity. In refining sugar and oil, in producing acids, 
dyes, and chemicals by the thousand, in 
vulcanising rubber, in making gas for what is Radiant Heat? 
illumination, flame has but performed its 
lower services. Its loftier incitement has lain in prompt- 
ing the student to pass from act to agent, to ask, What 
is the nature of heat, what medium propagates the solar 
ray, and what are the ties between heat and light and com- 
mon mechanical work? At sunrise all the rays of the sun, 
luminous and thermal, arrive at the earth together, just as 
all the sound-waves of an orchestra, multifarious as they 
are, travel in company from the instruments to the ear. 
That heat and light are twins inseparable has often meant 
loss when light alone has been in request, yet there has 
been a remarkable extension of knowledge of heat through 
study of light. 

First came Romer's observations, in 1676, of the eclipse 
of the satellites of Jupiter, establishing the velocity of light 
as 186,500 miles a second, a velocity, of course, shared by 
radiant heat. Romer's computation, substantially con- 
firmed by Bradley, at once suggested, What medium is 
it that transmits motion at a rate so prodigious? Is it a gas, 

79 



8o THE HIGHER TEACHINGS OF FIRE 




a corpuscular rain, or an ether — a more subtile kind of 
matter than visible or tangible bodies, and supposed to 
exist throughout all space, whether occupied by ordinary 
matter or not? Newton lent his great name to the corpus- 
cular view. Huygens advanced the theory of undulations 
in an ether — now universally accepted as the one satisfac- 
tory explanation of the facts. 

Young, in arguing for the theory of Huygens, drew at- 
tention to a common experiment with water-waves. If 
from two centres of motion two series of 
The Argument for wavcs circlc out, whcrcver a crest from 
Ether. q^q centre meets a crest from the other 

the two rise to a doubled height ; when 
a crest meets a trough, one cancels the other, and the water 
at that point is at rest (Fig. 20). He 
repeated this with light in a con- 
vincing manner. By simple optical 
means he divided a beam into two 
parts, one part half a wave-length 
behind the other. The two, after 
travelling by different paths, he re- 
united and let fall upon a screen, 
stopped, the other shone forth upon the screen, but if both 

were allowed to pass, the 
screen at regular inter- 
vals became dark. Two 
portions of light had 
destroyed each other 
through the coincidence 
of a crest and a trough,, 
as in the case of the 
water-waves (Fig. 21). 
Young from this concluded that light must be merely a 
motion, and not a substance ; for how could a substance 
be thus annihilated? Nevertheless it is held that the ether 



Fig. 20. 
Water-wave in dotted out- 
line neutralises wave in 
continuous outline, pro- 
ducing level surface. 

If either ray were 









Fig. 21. 
Interference of light-waves. 



ETHER DISCOVERED 81 

through which Hght and heat take their way is a substance, 
though of a tenuity so extreme as to be next to nothing. 
Professor de Volson Wood computed that a mass of it as 
large as the earth would weigh but 1.7 pounds. Lord 
Kelvin tells us that in a cubic mile of it surcharged with 
sunshine there resides but 20,000 foot-pounds of energy, 
no more than the equivalent of the exertion of a horse dur- 
ing thirty-six seconds. 

Within the limits of a single viewpoint the comparison 
of gases enables us to approach an explanation of the 
ether. Hydrogen, which is about one-sixteenth as tenu- 
ous as oxygen, transmits sound nearly four times as fast. If 
we can imagine a gas so much more tenuous than hydrogen 
as to convey motion with the speed of light, we may form 
an idea of the ether, and attempt, at least, to include the 
ether with ordinary matter as making up one continu- 
ous scheme of things. The question as to whether ordi- 
nary matter has originated from ether or not remains to be 
considered by the inquirers of the future. 

In bringing the man of science to the knowledge of ether, 
the study of light and heat has borne its worthiest fruit. An 
incalculable expansion of human thought has attended the 
proof that an ocean as wide as the universe bathes every 
particle of matter, and binds it to every other with bonds 
more rigid than links of steel. Ether, unseen and unfelt, 
except to the eye and grasp of reason, explains so many 
phenomena of light and heat as to be deemed not less real 
than air or water. And the laws of ethereal motion as 
manifested in the rays of flame have prepared the phi- 
losopher to study electricity aright. Every extension of 
electrical science only confirms the belief in that universal 
medium for which Huygens and Young argued when the 
evidence for it was not one-hundredth part as weighty as 
it is to-day. To formulate a theory of the ether, so that 
from the simplest assumptions may be deduced the facts 



82 THE HIGHER TEACHINGS OF FIRE 

of electricity, magnetism, and optics, is the chief aim of 
modern physical philosophy. 

Heat, though radiated with almost infinite velocity, is 

conducted with extreme slowness, and so the physicists of 

the eighteenth century clung to the old 

Heat Proved to be notion that heat is a material substance. 

Motion. phlogiston or caloric, which a body may 

absorb or expel much as a sponge takes 

in or gives out water. This error was dispelled for all 

time by the masterly experiments of Count Rumford. He 

noticed that much heat appeared in the boring of cannon, 

and repeating the operation with care, he found that by 

applying mechanical motion indefinitely he could produce 

corresponding quantities of heat indefinitely. Plainly, 

what could be thus created at will could not be matter, and 

the equivalence of heat and mechanical motion was forever 

established. Lucretius, eighteen centuries before, had 

guessed that heat is nothing but the swift motion of the 

ultimate particles of bodies. But as only he discovers who 

proves, the credit of the mechanical theory of heat rests 

with Count Rumford. 

Persuaded that heat is motion, physicists soon passed to 
the far-reaching conception that all other phases of energy, 
electricity and the rest, are also motion. An inquiry 
which at first concerned itself with only the thermometer 
as its instrument quickly demanded the fullest and utmost 
resources of the laboratory. Thanks to Meyer, Helmholtz, 
Joule, and Faraday, it was demonstrated beyond cavil that 
motion, like matter, may change its forms, but never its 
quantity ; that, eternal in its essence, it can neither be made 
from nothing nor brought to naught ; that, despite all its 
mutations, nature is but an infinite series of equations, no 
two of them different by so much as an atom or an atom's 
one gyration. 

It is singular how a modern investigator will repeat an 



STOREHOUSES OF ENERGY 83 

experiment that dates almost from the dawn of human 
skill, and discover a significance in it concealed until the 
hour of his interrogation. Ages ago the savage must have 
remarked that the hard work of grinding and polishing 
stone gave rise to heat. It remained for James Prescott 
Joule of Manchester, as recently as 1843, to carry forward 
by a decisive step the experiments which had begun with 
the savage and had been brought to a new meaning by 
Count Rumford. Joule set himself to find out exactly how 
much heat is equivalent to a given amount of work. He 
applied sinking weights to the agitation of water, and, tak- 
ing elaborate precautions against the escape of heat, he 
found that 1390 pounds in descending one foot could raise 
the temperature of a pound of water by i^ C. Here at last 
was rendered an accurate account of the enormous debt 
due to the ability to kindle fire. 

Wood, coal, and oil are among the most generous gifts 
of nature ; without them not only would man be poorer in 
material possessions, but also in the skill 
and intelligence drawn out in the use of The Vaiue of Fuels, 
fuels. A pound of carbon is no bigger 
than one's fist, and yet, if all the heat it yields in burning 
could be applied to mechanical toil, it would do as much as 
a strong labourer in a week. To put it in another way, if 
all the energy contained in 2.8 ounces of carbon could be 
converted into work without waste, it would exert one 
horse-power for an hour. Every grain beyond 2.8 ounces 
that an engine demands for this service is a measure of its 
imperfection. No wonder, then, that when water- or wind- 
power is turned to the warming of a room, the cost is, as a 
rule, prohibitory. To get as much heat as would be 
thrown out from the contents of a common coal-scuttle, 
say 50 pounds in weight of carbon, would demand fifty 
horse-power for five hours and forty-two minutes. A 
prodigious reservoir of energy is unloosed trigger-fashion 



84 THE HIGHER TEACHINGS OF FIRE 

in the act of kindling a blaze, in the trifling labour of rub- 
bing two sticks together, or striking a flint against a steel. 
A prehistoric smith by roundly hammering a bit of cop- 
per, or iron, on his anvil might warm it until it burned his 
fingers, while in a blaze the metal would not grow warm 
simply, but melt away. What Cyclops could wield a ham- 
mer with effect so violent? Plainly enough the capture of 
fire meant seizing a servant vastly more powerful than 
horse, or ox, or elephant, one that could be chained to 
tasks defying the might of either the winds or streams har- 
nessed to the clacking mill-shafts of old-time industry. 

And this servant, heat, is as fruitfully studied in the 
molecule as in the mass. One of the most pregnant the- 
ories due to the study of heat offers an 
The Kinetic Theory explanation of the pressure of gases or 
of Gases. vapours confincd in closed vessels. A 

thin, flat box containing but a pound of 
air can sustain, without the slightest hurt, a superincum- 
bent atmospheric pressure of many tons. How? The 
molecules of the air, light though they are, bombard the 
inner sides of the box with so great a velocity (about 1600 
feet a second) that the pressure from within exactly balances 
that from without. The speed of a projectile counts for as 
much as its density in creating its momentum — a tallow 
candle can be shot from a gun so as to pierce a thick oak 
plank. If we wish to confirm this kinetic theory of gases 
we are bidden to observe the rate at which common air 
rushes into a vacuum— we shall find it about 1600 feet a 
second. The inference is that the pressure of a gas, or a 
vapour, is at any instant represented by its actual motion 
through space. When, therefore, either steam or com- 
pressed air pushes a piston, there is nothing else done than 
giving up to the moving metal part of the projectile force 
from the gas. It is this parting with some of the motion 
in which heat consists that causes the temperature of the 



PROPERTIES DUE TO MOTION 85 

expanding substance to fall. We here observe one of the 
most important feats of engineering art — the conversion of 
heat into work. 

The explanation of properties as due to actual motion 
has been extended far and wide beyond the bounds of 
thermal phenomena ; it has become one 
of the fundamental conceptions of both Properties as Due 
physics and chemistry — now deemed ^° Motion, 

but the higher branches of mechanics. 
It is thought, for example, that every whit of the stupen- 
dous energy developed by fuels as they combine with oxy- 
gen in flame actually resides as motion in them before they 
unite. This chemic motion is believed to be distinct from 
the heat motion represented by temperature, just as the 
movement of the earth round its axis is distinct from its 
circling round the sun. At extremely low temperatures 
chemical unions refuse to take place, so that it seems to 
be necessary to superadd thermal to chemical motion, if 
chemical affinity is to have free play. Let us observe a 
lump of coal as it lies quiescent in the mine and the 
atmospheric oxygen needed for its combustion ; their 
chemic motion before their burning is held to be no more 
and no less than the visible and palpable motion which 
their flame would generate if applied without waste to 
doing work. 

Sir Isaac Newton was so profound a thinker that even 
his guesses pointed to truth. As he observed the extraordi- 
nary refractive power of the diamond he conjectured that it 
was highly combustible. In due time the diamond was 
proved to be carbon, and was burned in one laboratory 
after another as thoroughly as if it had been so much char- 
coal. Newton's guess proceeded from his noticing that 
refractiveness, as a rule, characterised combustible bodies. 
It may be that this property is the betrayal of an unusual 
quantity of contained chemic motion — which impedes and 



86 THE HIGHER TEACHINGS OF FIRE 

turns aside an impinging beam of light. Enriched as the 
modern notion of the molecule has become, little marvel 
that the epithet ''brute matter" is dropped from modern 
vocabularies. 

Investigators have not remained content with subtile in- 
quiries regarding molecules. They have passed from the 
unit to the all — from studying the atom 
The Probable Death ^o Considering the universe and its pos- 

of the Universe. siblc fate. In our survey of heat-engines 
we found that none of them converted 
heat into mechanical motion except with grievous waste. 
In truth heat is the form of energy hardest to convert into 
any other form ; while electricity, chemical action, and me- 
chanical motion easily and fully resolve themselves into 
heat. Heat by radiation, by convection, and by conduction 
ever tends to uniformity of temperature ; but it is only 
when differences of temperature exist that there is an op- 
portunity for the conversion of heat into work; just as 
every water-power in the world depends upon the differ- 
ence of level between one part of a stream and another. 

Suppose that in the morning of a summer day the ther- 
mometer stands at 30° C, and that we have at hand a 
pound of water at 0° C, and another pound of water at 
60° C. We can get work out of both : the hot water may be 
used to expand air and drive a piston ; the cold water may 
be employed to contract air and so move a piston in an 
opposite direction. But if, instead of doing this, we simply 
let the hot and cold water mingle together we shall have 
in a few seconds two pounds of water at 30° C, and 
no work whatever will have been performed, because the 
useful difference of temperature between the two pounds 
of water no longer exists. The ordinary temperature of the 
earth's surface is about 300° C. above absolute zero, and 
yet the vast store of heat thus represented is worthless as 
£ source of work, for where shall an engineer find a lower 



WILL THE UNIVERSE DIEI 87 

temperature gratis with which he may chill the working 
substance of an engine? 

With these plain facts before him, Professor WiUiam 
Thomson (now Lord Kelvin) nearly fifty years ago launched 
a speculation of the boldest. He reasoned that as the res- 
ervoir of unavailable heat in the universe is steadily gaining 
in quantity, it must eventually include all the working 
energy there is, and as matter at some indefinite future 
time will possess no other motion but that due to heat 
of high but uniform temperature, all further change will 
cease. In the present state of knowledge no flaw appears 
in the premises or deductions of this theory, and its sentence 
of death can be suspended only by the disclosure of coun- 
tervailing processes as yet undetected. That such pro- 
cesses may yet be discovered is suggested by the question, 
If the theory be true, why, in the eternity of the past, did 
not the clock of the universe run down, long ago ? 

That the "dissipation of energy," if real, is a slow pro- 
cess, is obvious from the marvellously sustained powers of 
the sun. Speculations as daring as they are ingenious have 
sought to account for the prodigious radiation of solar heat 
and light. It is estimated that to support this radiation 
from a single square foot of the sun's surface for one hour 
would demand the combustion of ten cubic feet of the 
densest coal. Upon what store of . energy can drafts so 
prodigal be honoured year after year, age after age? The 
most plausible theory is that due to Helmholtz — that the 
sun's temperature is maintained chiefly by the contraction 
of his mass. It is a remarkable fact, first pointed out by J. 
Homer Lane of Washington, in 1870, that a gaseous sphere, 
losing heat by radiation and contracting by its own gravity, 
must, rise in temperature and grow hotter until it ceases to 
be a "perfect" gas, either by beginning to liquefy, or by 
reaching a density at which the laws of " perfect " gases no 
longer hold. The kinetic energy developed by the shrink- 



88 THE HIGHER TEACHINGS OF FIRE 

age of a gaseous mass is more than enough to replace the 
loss of heat which caused the shrinkage. In the case of a 
liquid or solid mass this is not so.i 

Lord Kelvin asks whether the universe as a whole may 

not have limits in future time, and taste of death, as do its 

component moons, planets, and stars. 

Are there Limits to Profcssor Simon Ncwcomb, the eminent 

Occupied Space? astrouomcr, inquires whether the cos- 
mos may not also have limits in the 
space which it occupies. He estimates that the number 
of stars revealed in the camera is perhaps 100,000,000. 
He asks : " Are all these stars only those which happen 
to be near us in a universe extending without end, or 
do they form a collection of stars outside of which is 
empty infinite space? In other words, has the universe 
a boundary? " ^ Let some yet bolder mathematician com- 
pute, if he can, the temperature which would result from 
the consolidation of all the matter of the known universe 
into a single ball. 

In this realm of cosmical theories a remarkable contribu- 
tion appeared from Professor F. W. Clarke, in the Popu- 
lar Science Monthly., January, 1873. He drew attention 
to the fact that the hottest stars have the fewest elements 
in their spectra, and argued that as stars fall in temperature 
the increase in the number of their elements may be due to 
an evolution such as gives us chemical compounds on earth. 
This hypothesis has been ably maintained and developed 
by Sir Norman Lockyer, the astronomer. It offers an in- 
telligible basis for one of the most significant laws known 
to the chemist. His '' elements " have thus far resisted all 
available means of decomposition, but that they are really 
compounds is suspected from their falhng into family 

1 C. A. Young, General Astronomy, §356, 357. Dr. T. J. J. See, in the 
Atlantic Monthly, April, 1899, generalises the law of Lane. 

2 McClure's Magazine, July, 1899. 



FIRE-WORSHIP 89 

groups each characterised by kindred properties.^ The 
stars glow at temperatures far exceeding those possible in 
the laboratory, so that in the stellar spheres a resolution of 
" elements " may take place such as the chemist cannot 
hope to repeat with any heat it is in his power to produce. 

While fire bears the richest suggestion to the philoso- 
pher of to-day, it meant much, also, to his ancestor, the 
priest. He saw that that great flame, 
the sun, was not only the quickener and Fire and Religion, 
sustainer of life, but its destroyer, too. 
At his altar there was propitiation as well as homage. Fire 
as a symbol in this august worship has glowed in lands 
widely remote from each other. The solar cult has had 
its temples in Egypt and Chaldea, in Greece and Mexico. 
Nor are fire-worshippers extinct. They notably survive in 
India, at Bombay. Of kin to them is the Japanese, who 
solemnly brings into his house at the new year fire which 
has been lighted by rubbing wood on an appointed day. 
The Russian, in the district of Tamboff, carries all the ashes 
he can and some stones from his old hearth into a new 
house, to bring luck — a survival of the transference of the 
fire itself. 

Dr. D. G. Brinton says that all the American races, with 
the exception of the Eskimos, the North Athabascans, and 
a few others, have been sun-worshippers. The Comanches 
and Utes, for example, use the term " Father Sun," and 
perform dances and other rites in his honour. The Choc- 
taws, who were devoted sun-worshippers, maintained perpet- 
ual fire, as did the Creeks. The Moquis of northeastern 

1 The oxygen group, with the atomic weights of its elements, are : oxygen, 
16; sulphur, 32; chromium, 52; selenium, 79; molybdenum, 96; tellurium, 
125 ; tungsten, 183.6; uranium, 240. It will be noted that the figures which 
follow 16, the atomic weight of oxygen, are exactly or nearly multiples of 16. 
As an inference from the " periodic law," or, as one of its discoverers, New- 
lands, called it, the " law of octaves," the physical and chemical properties of 
an element are assumed to turn upon its atomic weight. 



90 THE HIGHER TEACHINGS OF FIRE 

Arizona continue their worship of the sun to this day. 
The dates for the ceremonies of their calendar are deter- 
mined by the position of the sun on the horizon. ^ In 
North America the tribal fires were political as well as re- 
ligious : they shone not only upon priest and devotee, but 
upon chief and councillor. Here an order of precedence as 
strict as that of modern courts was observed; as foray and 
defence were planned, the seniors sat next the blaze, with the 
people around them, the juniors farthest from the hearth. 

The founders of the cult of fire, Zoroaster and the rest, 
builded better than they knew. Every advance in science 
brings fresh perception that every throb of life around us 
has its mainspring in the sun. In entrapping a sunbeam, 
and releasing it ages afterward at a higher temperature, as 
rays from coal, the leaves of plants display a power to exalt 
the intensity of energy which is as mysterious to the phi- 
losopher as to the child. It is this postponed solar toil that 
we have been chiefly considering — a toil that has become of 
surpassing importance as the intelligence of man has grown 
from much to more. The savage may thrive with only the 
sun to work for him, but as he rises to barbarism he learns 
to kindle fire ; while the empires of civilisation depend 
upon nothing more indispensably than their coal-mines, 
their naval coaling-stations dotting every sea. Was it a 
forefeeling of all this that bade the pagan recall in fire the 
infinite might of the solar blaze — that led him to discard 
for the pure and compelHng flame the idols built from 
rock and tree? 

1 Christianity, with its roots deep in the religions which went before it, 
bears a clear impress of the solar cult. Christmas falls immediately after the 
winter solstice, when the day beginning to gain upon night may symbolise the 
victory of good over evil. It is curious to note that the chief religious cere- 
mony of the Moquis also occurs at the winter solstice. The second great 
festival of the Christian year reminds us that the moon once shared veneration 
with the sun. The Feast of the Resurrection takes place on the first Sunday 
after the first full moon on or next after March 21, the vernal equinox. 



MYTHS PROPHETIC 91 

In boyhood as one reads the myths of old they seem 
empty enough in meaning; not so when one takes them up 
in middle life. Were Briareus, with his 
hundred hands, and Argus, with his hun- Myth Prefigures Fact, 
dred eyes, anything but what the myth- 
maker himself desired to be? As he was opposed by 
mountains he wished to rend for his pathways, or by gulfs 
he would fain have bridged, he sighed at the feebleness of 
his bodily powers. Little wonder that he took comfort in 
imagining gods and heroes armed for tasks he so earnestly 
longed to perform, but which found him too puny for any- 
thing more than wishing. As man has come to more and 
more knowledge of nature, has grasped her forces with in- 
sight ever keener, the ancient dreams have come true, have 
been exceeded far. In days of old, when a ship moved 
through the sea against the wind, the sailor had to labour 
at an oar. To-day his hand is upon the rudder, not the oar; 
he has passed, like many a craftsman, from the lowly plane 
of immediate muscular exertion to the guiding of forces 
titanic in comparison with those of his own feeble frame. 

Fire, in these modern times, has wrought blessings such 
as the ancients never dared to pray for. It has abolished 
much of the most exhausting drudgery known among men, 
as in building and mining. Upon people who count them- 
selves poor it bestows an array of comforts in shelter, cloth- 
ing, and food, in travel cheap and safe, which in the past 
fifty years have not only lengthened life, but made life bet- 
ter worth having while it lasts. Let us change a word in 
Shakespeare so as to have him say : '' How oft the sight of 
means to do o-ood deeds makes g-ood deeds done ! " If cruelty 
is disappearing from among civilised men, if Mercy widens 
her field with every passing year, if Hope sees new and 
assured ground for further betterment as one generation 
succeeds another, much must be credited to man's new 
ability to enjoy wholesome pleasures, to avoid pain and evil 



92 THE HIGHER TEACHINGS OF FIRE 

which were believed, until our day, to be as inevitable as 
doom. And in that new ability a leading place must be 
accorded the supersession of the hand and arm by flame, 
the application of fire to tasks impossible, and even un- 
imagined, when the hand and arm were unseconded and 
alone in the field of toil. 

It is a common remark that there is wealth enough in 
the world, were it only fairly apportioned. But let us re- 
member that were the total yearly income of the American 
people, one of the richest on earth, allotted equally among 
its teeming milHons, each share would be about two hun- 
dred dollars. Could this be called wealth? In truth, the 
world is poor, and while equity in distribution is desirable, 
not less desirable is it to increase the sum of divisible things 
by the untiring furtherance of knowledge at work. 

Man owes to fire a yet weightier debt than either its in- 
dustrial harvests or the physical theories which it has 

prompted. While as a thinker he has 
A Scientific Philosophy, passcd from fact to law, from detail to 

generalisation, his study of fire, of all 
that fire has brought in its train, has given breadth and 
depth to his philosophy. The more it has taught him of 
truth, the wider has it plumed the wings of his imagination 
for a secure flight into realms beyond the range of the eye. 
The savage, as he sought to explain what he saw around 
him, indulged in many a wild and baseless notion as to 
what lay beneath appearances. His fancies to-day are held 
but as the games and stories of childhood ; the established 
theory of evolution peoples all space and all time with a 
procession of life, an involution of drama, that dwarfs and 
shrivels all purely invented story, all phantasms unrooted 
in fact. The ccsmogories of the cave and the wigwam have 
now little other interest than as chapters in the natural his- 
tory of error, the first stumblings of the human mind in 
the long road which at last approaches truth. To-day the 



FIRE A FORERUNNER 93 

student of the universe looks witJiin it, not without it, for 
the forces to explain its history. As his studies proceed 
he becomes more and more firmly convinced that nature 
is intelligible to her very core, that she has no laws which 
',t is not his privilege and duty to know. In that order a 
tremendous part is played by the antithetical forces of Heat 
and Gravitation — Heat that sunders, and Gravitation that 
consolidates and unites. 

Rich through all the ages of man's history as Fire was in 
itself, however lavish its gifts in woodland and mine, work- 
shop and home, battle-field and temple, it was all the while 
a means no less than an end : it was preparing man to yoke 
to his chariot another servant as mighty — Electricity. Skill 
of hand with stick and stone entered a new kingdom when 
a spark of fire was created, preserved, and set to work ; in 
its turn, fire made ready the way for conquests impossible 
to itself, as it brought man to the pitch of knowledge and 
skill needed for his new role as electriciaHo 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE PRODUCTION OF ELECTRICITY 

THROUGH the course of all the ages since the first 
kindling of fire, almost down to our own day, flame 
had beside her a twin force all unrecognised. Now it 

gHnted as lightning, anon as the aurora 
Unsuspected Kinship, it Streamed fitfully across the sky. It 

clothed itself in the amber of the sea- 
beach that, under gentle friction, drew to itself fragments 
of fallen leaves, of withered grass, or, in the hands of a 
comber, obliged tow and flax to fly apart as if in a lively 
breeze. Arrayed in iron it took on an iron constancy, 
unsupported masses defying the pull of gravitation for 
years together, and, as the legend tells us, sorely puzzling a 
shepherd by holding his crook fast to the ceiling of a cave 
roofed, as we would say now, with magnetic ore. Afloat 
in a bowl of water, the earliest recorded use of the lode- 
stone is to point Chinese diviners to lucky sites for projected 
buildings ; it was not until a much later time that the com- 
pass began to aid the mariner when sun and star were 
hidden. Little marvel that so various a masquerade was 
long impenetrable, that it should be only five generations 
ago that Franklin was able to identify the spark from the 
storm-cloud with the spark from his Leyden jar. 

Between the first observations of flame and of electricity 
there is only contrast; flame, even while passively received, 

94 



FORERUNNERS OF FRANKLIN 95 

before the skill to kindle it had appeared, was recognised 
as useful. Electricity, on the other hand, was so fitful in 
its play, so slight in quantity, that no serious attention was 
ever paid to its phenomena until comparatively recent 
times. Not until the eighteenth century was it suspected 
that the tiny sparks due to common friction were of iden- 
tical character with the dreaded lightning of the sky. The 
conductor devised by Franklin for the protection of build- 
ings is first in the order of time among useful electrical in- 
ventions, just as the compass is first among magnetic 
contrivances. 

The experiments of Franklin were possible in that he 
was rich by inheritance from an illustrious line of investi- 
gators, of whom four stand out so pre- 
eminently as to divide honours with their Four Great Pioneers. 

great successor. These four are William 
Gilbert, Otto von Guericke, Stephen Gray, and Dean 
von Kleist. Their labours did much toward opening 
the path which should end at last in creating a force by 
turns an ally or a rival to fire itself; they showed (i) how 
electricity could be produced in quantities comparatively 
large, and with new facility; (2) how a charge could be 
insulated and so preserved from dissipation; (3) that 
such a charge was transmissible for long distances with 
but little loss, and with seeming instantaneity ; (4) that 
electricity could be excited in an uncharged body as it 
approached a charged body, by just the same induction 
that excites magnetism in common iron as it comes near a 
compass. 

Gilbert, who was court physician to Queen Elizabeth, 
began his studies of electricity by an elaborate investiga- 
tion of the properties of the magnet. Poising a light, 
metallic needle compass-fashion, he was able to measure 
the attractive force in the various substances which he ex- 
cited electrically and brought near this first of all electrical 



I 



96 THE PRODUCTION OF ELECTRICITY 

instruments (Fig. 22). He discovered that there are many 
substances, Hke amber and jet, which, when electrified by 
friction, exert attraction ; of these substances he drew up a 

useful list. He ascertained, also, 
^ that the substances which refuse 
to be electrified by friction are not 
few, but many. This class he 
named non-electrics, including 

Gilbert's electroscope. 111 m 

among them the lodestone, sil- 
ver, gold, copper, and common iron ; all these were to be 
grouped at a later day as conductors, to be distinguished 
from the non-conductors which Gilbert called electrics. 
His means of examination were inadequate to the proof 
that conduction is a universal property of matter, and 
that all the difference between copper and glass in this 
respect is that they occupy the two extremes of a single 
scale. In the vast difference between the conductivity 
of copper and of glass lay the possibility, soon to be 
realised, of sending electricity afar by giving it an easy 
path of travel, a path hedged in by a covering through 
which the charge could not escape. Gilbert discovered 
that a piece of silk laid upon an electric directly after 
friction preserved a charge of electricity. This was of 
cardinal importance, for now such a charge could be 
preserved as had never before been possible. He noted, 
too, that the transmission of electricity seemed to be in- 
stantaneous.i 

Otto von Guericke, the famous burgomaster of Magde- 
burg, who flourished about the middle of the seventeenth 
century, devised the first machine for the production of 
electricity. This was simply a ball of brimstone turned 
on an axle, against which silk and cloth were firmly held 

1 An account of Gilbert's achievements, which included much else of mo- 
ment, is given in The Intellectual Rise in Electricity, by Park Benjamin. 
New York, Appleton, 1895. 



FIRST ELECTRICAL MACHINE 



97 



(Fig. 23). The device marks the entrance of electricity as 
a creation of mechanical power on a scale impossible to the 
friction of handkerchiefs on glass. It brought out the fact, 
too, for those who cared to think about it as they turned 
the handle of the apparatus, that the generation of electri- 
city meant hard work, and that the attractions or repulsions 




Fig. 23. 
Von Guericke's first electrical machine. 



which resulted from the machine's operation were no other 
than the reappearance of this work. Von Guericke's 
crude device was succeeded by a bottle-shaped cylinder of 
glass ; next came the circular glass plate whose sparks were 
caught on metallic teeth and borne away to work their 
wonders. Von Guericke, by varying the form of a con- 
ductor, came upon a discovery of prime importance. In- 
stead of using a mass of metal of the usual compact form, 
he employed a linen thread, an ell or more in length; he 
found that the electric charge traversed it in a twinkling. 
He thus extended and confirmed the observation of Gil- 
bert as to the speed of electricity. 



98 THE PRODUCTION OF ELECTRICITY 

Stephen Gray, a pensioner in the Charterhouse of Lon- 
don, in 1728 and thereabout carried forward the work of 
Von Guericke in a masterly way. He observed that even 
very short pieces of silk were impervious to electricity, so 
that with silk as his insulator he succeeded in conveying an 
electric charge through a metallic wire for a distance of 
more than three hundred feet. Here was the first practical 
use of an insulator as a means of promoting the transmis- 
sion of a charge to a long distance. Gray discovered, 
furthermore, that his electrified glass tube affected his line 
without contact — by induction, as in the case of bits of foil 
observed long before by himself and his predecessors. Next 
to Gray in this early roll of honour stands Dean von Kleist, 
of the Cathedral of Camin in Pomerania, who, in 1745, in- 
vented the original form of Leyden jar. This was simply 
a vial in which a nail, or bunch of wire, was charged with 
electricity ; protected by the non-conducting glass, the 
inclosed metal maintained its charge for a comparatively 
long period. 

It was by such steps as these, humble and tardy as they 
were, that electricity began to take its place beside fire as 
one of the supreme resources of man. He had now dis- 
covered how he could best generate it by a wise choice of 
substances to be rubbed together; he had learned to dis- 
criminate between things which convey electricity very well 
and very badly; he came to know how, by the use of bad 
conductors or non-conductors, a charge might be preserved 
from the almost immediate dissipation that followed every 
old-time experiment ; and, above all else, he had found that 
electricity has a pace so rapid that it seemed instantaneous. 

The electricity of the frictional machine was now easily 
stored for as much as an hour at a time, and the range of 
electrical experiment passed from the laboratory of the 
student to the drawing-room of fashion. Experiments 
familiar to us all from childhood excited interest through- 



CHEMISTS TAKE THE STAGE 99 

out wide circles of the learned and the uninformed. Pith- 
balls charged with positive or negative electricity were 
suspended to repel each other just as the north or the south 
poles of two magnets drove each other away. Then, to 
balance marvel with marvel, two strips of gold-leaf, when 
oppositely electrified, sprang together as eagerly as the 
north pole of one magnet seeks the south 
pole of another (Fig. 24). Here was a clear 
intimation as to the identity of electricity 
and magnetism which led in due season to the 
best modern means of producing them both. 

Thus far the generation of electricity had 
no practical worth. Its attraction and its 
sparks were too feeble to be more than curi- 
ous, for the moment the operator's hand 
ceased to turn the axle of a machine all elec- 
trical phenomena vanished. As compared 
with the first fire-making this early produc- 
tion of electricity was much more artificial, 
but it was not artificial enough. To rub a ^ig 24 
globe or disc of glass with a silk handkerchief Electrical repul- 
is certainly a farther reach of artifice than to sion and at- 
abrade one stick against another, or to strike ^^^ ^°"* 

together two pieces of iron pyrites. Yet, when the fire- 
maker brought his spark or smouldering dust to fuel, his 
labour was not only immensely heightened in effect, but 
carried on indefinitely, and this without another blow or 
thrust from his arm. There was wanting a similar step in 
electric art: it was necessary that for a time the chemists 
should bow the mechanics off the stage. 

As early as the fifth century it was recorded by the 
Greek historian, Zosimus, that iron swords plunged into 
copper solutions came out coated with a film of copper. 
This observation, like that of the first lodestone, came too 
soon to bear fruit at once. It was not until 1759 that 




loo THE PRODUCTION OF ELECTRICITY 




Fig. 25. 
Galvani's experiment. 



Galvani noticed that a metal wire touching at one end 

the nerves of a frog, and at the other end the muscles 

of its leg, caused a momentary twitch- 

voita Invents the Pile ing. When he used two wires of differ- 

and the Crown of Cups. ^^^ ^^^^j^ ^^^ COUtractioUS WCrC much 

more vigorous (Fig. 25). As he found 

the same convulsive movement followed from the spark of 

a frictional machine, he concluded 

that the phenomena had a common 

origin in the animal itselL Volta 

took the next step; he reasoned 

that the electrical energy was due 

rather to the action of the wires 

than to any property of the frog's 

flesh. Following this train of 

thought, he built up a series of 
zinc and silver 

discs, separating each disc by cloth mois- 
tened in acidulated water ; from this '* pile " 
he obtained electricity in the form of a 
flow, much more satisfactory than had ever 
been evolved from a frictional apparatus 
(Fig. 26). 

For the first time In human art electrici- 
ty now poured forth in the absence of toil; 
here was just such an advance as that of 
obtaining heat from fuel instead of from 
muscular exertion : the feat of starting a 
blaze which continues itself and leaves its 
kindler free had found its parallel. Before 
Volta a charge of electricity was no more 
than could be excited by rubbing one sur- 
face on another; he invoked the might of 

chemical forces which involve masses instead. As each 

disc of zinc dissolved in his pile it presented a rapid 




Fig. 26. 
Volta's pile. 




Plate I 



ALESSANDRO VOLT A. 



A CURRENT AT LAST loi 

succession of new surfaces to the intense affinity of the 
corroding hqiiid. Before the time of the great Itahan's 
device, electricity was Httle more than a curiosity, an actu- 
ator of toys, instructive if you will, but toys nevertheless. 
As soon as the voltaic pile was constructed electricity was 
no longer something to stare at, but a force to work with 
— a servant to take orders of the most exacting kind and 
execute them with fidelity. 

As Volta built his experimental pile higher and higher, he 
found it more and more faulty, for the moisture was harm- 
fully squeezed from the lower pieces of the acid-holding 
cloth. In 1800 he abandoned it and devised the ** crown of 
cups," a battery of the simplest type and the parent of every 
battery since fabricated ; each cell contained a plate of zinc 
and a plate of silver immersed in an acid solution. The 
current now obtained, though uneven, had the character of 
a flow from a reservoir, at low pressures to be sure, but in 
quantity vastly greater than the discharge from a frictional 
machine, and without the bolt-like and unbiddable quality 
of the machine spark. When voltaic cells as a series were 
joined as the links of a chain, the zinc plate of one cup at- 
tached by a wire to the silver plate of the adjoining cup, 
each exalted the intensity of the next, and there was a 
distinct approach to the lightning tension of the original 
apparatus built of glass (Fig. 27). For generations the sole 
incentive to electrical inquiry had been philosophic curios- 
ity — the desire to know, not the desire to profit. The 
moment that Volta disposed his crown of cups this dis- 
interested quest came to a great reward : a new agent was 
brought under easy control — ^an agent of powers known to 
be remarkable, of qualities surmised to be transcendent. 

A link between the old servant, heat, and the new candi- 
date for employment, electricity, was soon discerned. It 
had long been observed that a metal as it dissolved in an 
acid solution underwent a rusting process accompanied by 



102 THE PRODUCTION OF ELECTRICITY 

a rise of temperature. Fabrioni in Italy, and WoUaston 
and Davy in England, now pointed out that the zinc in a 
battery rusted away without any evolution of heat what- 
ever. It remained for Faraday some years afterward to 
identify the heat which zinc may yield, as it corrodes by 
itself in an acid bath, with the electricity it may evolve in 
a voltaic cell, and to prove that in terms of energy the two 
are the same. The failure of the voltaic battery to pro- 
duce electricity at a low price turns upon the fact that even 
if the zinc cost no more per ton than coal, it has but one- 
seventh the fuel or energy value ; furthermore, coal employs 
air without cost to form its compounds, while zinc demands 
expensive acids. We shall presently see how coal is indi- 
rectly employed, through the steam-engine, to produce 
electricity, and with an economy which restricts the voltaic 
battery to a minor range of utilities. 

There is an alliance of heat with electricity which is im- 
mediate, and dispenses with the roundabout processes of 

the steam-engineer. Heat from coal and 
The Thermo-battery, other fucls may be directly applied to 

generate a current, although with a 
waste so enormous as to be prohibitory. The pioneer in 
this field was Seebeck, who in 1822 showed that when 
heat is applied at the junction of two different metals an 
electric current is created. Subsequent trials on a compre- 
hensive scale proved that antimony and bismuth form the 
best pair for this effect. Notwithstanding many attempts 
at its improvement, the thermo-electric battery remains un- 
satisfactory. Its pairs are apt to break apart by inequal- 
ities of expansion and contraction, and the metals employed 
lose efficiency from causes referable to molecular change. 

A thermo-battery that would be simple, compact, not 
liable to get out of order, and of moderate cost, would 
have wide acceptance ; for although but an extremely small 
part of the heat sent through it might be converted into 



UNITY DETECTED 



103 



electricity, that fraction would be clear gain in many cases. 
Very often heat is required only for warming, and air or 
water after it had passed through a thermo-battery would 
be at a temperature quite high enough for this purpose. 
While the thermo-battery has developed no industrial value 
as a source of current, it has become in the laboratory an 
exquisitely delicate means of detecting minute quantities 
of heat. An electrical thermometer invented by Professor 



Callender is accurate to yo-oUo" 



of 1° C. The means of 



this detection depend upon the discovery of the kinship of 
magnetism and electricity, and this brings us to the phase 
of electrical art which has the highest practical importance. 
When early investigators saw electrified bits of foil at- 
tract and repel each other as if they were magnets, they 
began to ask, Is there anything in com- 
mon between the smiting together of The Unity of Eiec- 

, . 1 1 1 r -1 1 • tricity and Magnetism 

morsels 01 goid-leai oppositely electri- Detected, 

fied, and the clashing of steel oppositely 
magnetised? Orsted answered this question in 1820, as 
he deflected a compass-needle, ab^ by a wire, NSy convey- 
ing a current (Fig. 28). 
Ampere, in a series of 
conclusive experiments, 
further explored the re- 
lations between magnet- 
ism and electricity. He 
showed that wires bear- 
ing currents attract or 
repel each other just as 
magnets do. His most 
telHng demonstration was 
the poising of a coil of wire, compass-fashion, so as to 
permit the utmost freedom of movement; when a current 
was sent through this coil it took up a north-and-south 
position, attracted iron tacks and filings, and attracted or 




Fig. 28. 
Orsted's experiment. 



104 THE PRODUCTION OF ELECTRICITY 



repelled a steel magnet precisely as if it were a magnet 
itself (Fig. 29). The inference was clear — a steel magnet 

may be considered as a coil, 
or spiral, affected by elec- 
tricity in rotation. 

One contrast, however, 
was evident from the first 
— the moment that a cur- 
rent through a coil ceases, 
its magnetism vanishes, 
while the attractive power 
of a steel magnet may 
be maintained for years. 
Around every magnet is a 
space, or '' field," through 
which it exerts influence in 
a manner easily brought to 
view. We have only to 
strew iron filings on a sheet 
of paper close to the pole of 
a magnet, and a few gentle 
taps will cause the filings to 
stand out in radial Hnes (Fig. 30). If we take the same 
paper, and, removing the magnet, pierce the sheet with a 
fine wire conveying an electric current, the filings will now 
dispose themselves in concentric curves instead of in radial 
Hnes (Fig. 31). 

Sturgeon, in 1824, advanced matters by an important 
step as he discriminated between the magnetism of steel 
and that of soft iron. He noticed that soft iron was mag- 
netic only while in contact with a steel magnet; when 
he severed them the soft iron at once lost its attractive 
power. He found also that if a core of soft iron was 
placed within an electrical coil, the iron instantly became 
a magnet of uncommon strength ; and that the moment 




Fig. 29. 

Electric solenoid pole (A) attracted by- 
dissimilar pole (B) of bar magnet. 




Plate 111. 



From a photog7'aj>k by Maul e- Fo.v, Loiido 

MICHAEL FARADAY. 
(Holding a bar of heavy glass.) 



ELECTROMAGNET IMPROVED 



105 





Fig. 30. Fig. 31. 

Magnetic lines of force. Electric lines of force. 

the current was br.oken the magnetism of the iron disap- 
peared (Fig-. 32). 

Professor Joseph Henry, in researches conducted from 
1828 to 1830, much improved Sturgeon's device. That 

inventor had wound but one coil 
of copper wire a-round his magnet, 
using varnish on the iron as a means 
of insulation. Henry insulated a 
long wire with silk thread, and 
wound this around the iron in sev- 
eral close coils, 
obtaining a much 
more powerful 
effect than Sturgeon's (Fig. 33). In this 
temporary magnet, or electromagnet, as 
thus improved, la}'- a gift to science and 
art incomparably more valuable than the 
permanent steel magnet could ever be. 
In America, from the beginning of electric 
telegraphy until now, an electromag- 
net has been the indispensable heart of the apparatus. 
A momentary current from a distant station is received 
in a coil of copper wire ; that instant its soft iron core 



Fig. 32. 
Sturgeon's electromagnet. 




Fig. 33. 
Henry's electro- 
magnet. 



io6 THE PRODUCTION OF ELECTRICITY 

becomes a magnet, and in attracting its armature gives a 
signal. 

If electricity was ever to take its place beside fire as a 
servant of equal or superior value, it was imperative that 
an electric current should be generated 
The Dynamo is Born, ^t low cost. Here the voltaic- and the 
thermo-batteries had failed ; both chem- 
ical and direct thermal action proved to be too expensive 
for any but limited uses. There remained but one avenue 
in which hope lay of a current cheap enough to be used 
as freely as flame — perchance, indeed, as its supplanter. 
Electricity in large quantity and at a low price is a boon 
due to the electromagnet, which is essential not only to the 
telegraph, but to the dynamo and motor as well. It is 
these devices that have taken electricity from the seclusion 
of the laboratory to the engine-rooms and workshops of 
the world. Both the dynamo and motor sprang from the 
inves'tigations of Faraday in 183 1, as he repeated and ex- 
tended the inquiries of Orsted. It had long been known 
that a steel magnet induces magnetism in a soft iron mass 
as they approach each other, and in a degree determined 
by the proximity of the two. Faraday discovered that the 
PRIMARY. like is true in the 

province of elec- 

s"oNx>^Rv. tricity. "Let there 

Fig. 34. be two copper 

Electricalinduction. wires," Said he, 

" parallel to and near each other. Send a current through 

the first and a momentary current is induced in the second 

(Fig. 34). Vary the quantity of the primary current, or 

break it off completely, and at once there is a response 

in the secondary wire." 

He then extended his researches to the ties which bind 
magnetism and electricity. Orsted had observed that an 
electric current produces motion in an adjacent magnet 




Fig. 27. 

Volta's crown of cups. 




Fi(- 35- 
Faraday'b magneto-eleclric machine. 



THE FIRST DYNAMO 



107 



nicely poised. Faraday developed the converse truth — 
that a magnet moved near a conductor induces a current 
therein. That here was a means of generating electricity 
by mechanical means he at once proceeded to show. A 
disc of copper a foot in diameter, and about a fifth of 
an inch in thickness, was fastened in a frame so as to be 
easily turned by a handle, the edge of the metal lying be- 
tween and close to the poles of a large permanent magnet 
(Fig. 35). Two conducting wires were applied to the disc, 
one at its rim, S, the other at its axle, N; these bore away 
the current generated as the disc was turned. Here, as in 
all similar cases, the motion of a conductor in the field of a 
magnet created a stream of electricity equal in energy- 
value to the mechanical exertion expended. Faraday's 
apparatus, simple as it is in form, is the parent of every 
dynamo since constructed ; and because mechanical power 
is vastly cheaper than chemical energy we have to thank 
him for emanci- 
pating electricity 
as an agent for 
common, every- 
day tasks — some 
of them, indeed, 
once within the 
exclusive province 
of fire itself. 

In embodying 
Faraday's discov- 
ery in a machine 
of the best design, the first step was taken when Dr. Pacinotti, 
of the University of Pisa, in i860 shaped an armature into 
the form of a ring. Gramme, about eleven years later, in- 
vented a machine in which this ring armature formed the 
chief feature. Fig. 36 shows this machine as a simplified 
skeleton. As rotated between the magnetic poles, N and 




Fig. 36. 
Gramme Machine. 



io8 THE PRODUCTION OF ELECTRICITY 

S, a current is generated in the wire surrounding the ring, 
which current is carried off by the wires shown just within 
the ring. 

We should note in passing that Faraday's model is ca- 
pable of rotation if a current be applied at its rim and axle ; 
in other words, the machine is perfectly reversible and may 
be used as a motor if a current is required to yield mechan- 
ical power. The motors which to-day furnish power from 
currents on a large commercial scale are little else than 
dynamos reversed, yet the reversal, obvious as it seems 
now, was not adopted until 1873, although it was known 
to Jacobi in 1850, and probably to Lenz twelve years be- 
fore. In 1873 several Gramme dynamos were to be shown 
at the Vienna Exposition. A workman, seeing a pair of 
loose wires near one of the machines, connected them with 
it; the other ends of the wires proved to be bound to a 
dynamo in full rotation, its source of power being a steam- 
engine near by. The second and newly attached machine 
at once began to revolve in a reverse direction — as a motor. 
Thus, in all likehhood by sheer accident, it was discovered 
that one dynamo may yield in mechanical power the 
electric energy sent to it from another dynamo at a 
distance. In the whole realm of industrial art there is no 
more striking example than this of a rule that works both 
ways. 

In its developed form the electric motor is somewhat 
modified from the dynamo in model ; both of them in their 
latest and beat designs come short of perfect efficiency by 
only 2j per cent. Using a steam-engine or a water-wheel 
as its prime mover, the dynamo is much the cheapest means 
of producing electricity, supplanting, for all but inconsider- 
able uses, the primary chemical cell invented by Volta. 

Having cast a hasty glance at the principal steps in 
obtaining a current with more and more economy, let us 
begin a rapid survey of its appHcations, first of all taking 



DR. YOUNG'S INSIGHT FAILS 109 

up those where its heat is turned to account, in singular 
rivalry with fire. 

But before we pass on it behooves us to note how strictly 
the ablest men are the children of their own day, with all 
its limitations of horizon. Among English physicists the 
greatest since Newton is Dr. Thomas Young. In 1807, 
thirteen years before the decisive discovery by Orsted, Dr. 
Young wrote : '* There is no reason to imagine any imme- 
diate connection between electricity and magnetism, except 
that electricity affects the conducting powers of iron or 
steel for magnetism in the same manner as heat or agi- 
tation." ^ 

1 Lectures on Natural Philosophy, London edition, 1845, ^o^- I> P* SS^* 



CHAPTER IX 

ELECTRIC HEAT 

THERE are many cases where a task of so much mo- 
ment is performed by a little heat that its cost need 
not be considered. Hence we find that long before elec- 
tric currents were cheapened by the 

From the Miner's dyuamo there WaS noteworthy employ- 
Fuse to the ■' . J f J 
Forge and Weld. mcut of the high temperatures born of 

electricity. In early experiments these 
temperatures were observed as a conducting wire was 
narrowed in diameter. When for an inch or two it was re- 
duced to extreme fineness, it could there be fused by a cur- 
rent as by a furnace breath, through increased local resis- 
tance. The molten drops betrayed as they fell that the 
new agent, electricity, was no other than the old servant, 
heat, in an easily discarded dress. The miner had long 
been vexed by the uncertainty and hazard of fuses lighted 
by common fire, both dampness and rupture contributing to 
the frequency of serious hurt and damage. With electric 
heat led into a fine wire he could now fire a fuse with per- 
fect safety at any distance he pleased, and blast a rock at 
as many points as he chose all at the same moment, with 
an effect otherwise impossible. 

The gunner soon learned the miner's lesson. In a battle 
at sea a whole broadside may be directed upon a single 
turret of the enemy's fleet, and fired with a destructiveness 



SHAPING METALS in 

new in the art of war. If the gun-decks of a cruiser are 
so enveloped in smoke that the foe cannot be seen by the 
men at the guns, the firing may be directed by an officer 
far enough away to be in clear air. In like manner the 
submarine mines and the torpedoes impressed into defence, 
or attack, are exploded at the commander's nod by a tele- 
graph-key a mile or two off. The surgeon, who is never 
far away when the gunner and torpedo crew are busy, is 
equally served by electric heat, employing it as he does for 
a delicate cautery. 

In the arts of peace electric heat, even at comparatively 
low temperatures, is widely useful since its cheap produc- 
tion by the dynamo. A current of dangerously high ten- 
sion may sometimes by accident enter an instrument or 
machine ; but if in the gateway it. must traverse a strip of 
lead and tin alloy, the metal will melt away, and the current 
thus interrupted can do no harm. When severe frost has 
frozen a water-pipe an electric current warms the metal 
and thaws the ice much more quickly 
and conveniently than flame. In the 
manufacture of fine varnishes, in the 
reduction of sulphide nickel ores, 
in tempering metals, it is necessary 
to maintain a certain temperature 
and guard against its slightest in- 
crease ; in all such tasks the easily 
regulated heat of electric origin 
leaves nothing to be desired. The ^^^al shaped under 

electric heat. 

manufacture of felt hats requires a 

sustained heat at definite temperatures; this is supplied 
much more satisfactorily by electric coils than by gas-flames. 
Metal-workers adopt electric heat with peculiar gain. 
When a strip or tube of iron, copper, or brass is to be bent, 
twisted, coiled, or hammered, the work is easy if the metal 
is first softened by electric heat. Hooks, links, axes, and 




112 ELECTRIC HEAT 

other tools are formed as readily as if in wax (Fig. 37). 
In this branch of industry the expert may excite the on- 
looker's wonder by tying a knot in a stout rod of steel as 
if he were manipulating a yard or two of rope. A new 
electric machine brings a rivet to redness, and, just before 
it might melt, secures it in place by extreme pressure. 

Temperatures higher still open the way to the electric 
welder. The flame of a forge or a furnace is often difficult 
to apply, especially when large masses of metal have to be 
treated. Let two pieces of metal, however large and 
irregular in form, be forced together within the clamps of 
an Elihu Thomson machine, and at their point of contact 
a welding heat is developed precisely where it is wanted. 
When the broken blade of a steamship's propeller is to be 
repaired, or the standing rigging of a ship is to be united, 
or the rails of a street-railroad are to become a continuous 
line of metal, the electric welder can be taken to its work 
instead of the work having to go to a stationary welder. 

Within the walls of a factory this appliance is quite as 
useful and even more versatile. It joins the tires of bi- 
cycles, carriages, and wagons ; it unites tubes, pipes, barrels, 
and band-saws; for the telegraph and the telephone it 
supersedes the old and imperfect splicing by a joint and so 
enables lines of direct com- 

~^^^^^ munication to be much 

f ■?' 1 

longer than before (Fig. 
* ^ ' 38). In lumber-mills it 

The old weld and the new. , . . ,, 

resets a tooth accidentally 
torn from a saw, and rarely does the metal ever part 
again at the same point of stress. In the service of 
war it binds a tip of hardened metal to the soft case of 
a shrapnel shell, and forms into a single mass the ponderous 
anchor of a flag-ship. All this gain in convenience and 
cleanliness, accessibility and economy, arises from having 
intense heat without flame, and from being able to apply it at 



ARC IN METAL-WORKING 113 

one particular point and no other. As a consequence, fire 
is dispossessed from many tasks which until our day it was 
believed that only fire could perform. Another supplant- 
ing of the ancient work of fiame is due to the fact that its 
temperatures are far outdistanced by those of electricity. 

The electric arc as we see it glowing in the thorough- 
fares of cities has much the appearance of exceedingly 
brilliant flame. The Bernardos process 
uses this arc for metal-working with ex- "^^^ ^^^^'s Fierce Heat, 
cellent results. A rod of carbon in an 
operator's hand forms one pole of the circuit, the metal to 
be softened or melted forms the other pole. In the Slaw- 
ianoff metTiod, a metal rod forms the second pole ; as its 
molten drops fall upon the surface to be welded, the effect 
is usually preferable to that of Bernardos. Both plans are 
extensively employed in the repair-shops of the Russian 
government railroads. The harveyised steel for armour- 
plates is so hard as to resist drilling for the insertion of its 
bolts; the electric arc in a moment reduces the metal to 
plasticity at the point where the drill is to perform its duty. 
A boiler-plate ruptured by accident is fused like wax by 
treatment of a little longer duration, while sheet metal is 
cut away as if it were so much paper. Brazing, even on a 
large scale, is accomplished with celerity and cleanliness. 
Were it not for the blinding glare of the arc these uses of 
it would be less uncommon than they are. 

In the Kroll process of glass-making, recently tested at 
Cologne, an electric arc replaces fiame with manifold advan- 
tages. The materials are fused in fifteen minutes instead 
of in thirty hours; two-fifths of the fuel is saved; there is 
no risk of dirt or ashes falling into the glass; and on 
Sundays and holidays work may be stopped with no loss 
whatever, as there are no bulky and expensive furnaces to 
be cooled down. 

As a rule water quenches fire. What shall we say when 



114 



ELECTRIC HEAT 




^te^ 



we see a bar of cold iron dipped into a bath of water and 
quickly rise to a white heat? The mystery is solved when 
we observe that one pole of a powerful battery or dynamo 
is connected with the bar, while the other pole is attached 

to the lead lining of the bath. 
The water as decomposed by the 
current deposits a film of hydro- 
gen on the surface of the iron, 
and the high resistance of the gas 
gives rise to so intense a heat as 
virtually to create an electric arc. 
This arc, always unquenchable by 
water, rapidly raises the metal to 
a very high temperature. Sal- 
soda is added to the liquid so as 
to improve its conduction of the current; borax also is 
dissolved in liberal quantities to remove any oxide which 
may be formed (Fig. 39). 

Beyond the temperatures suited to welding, glass-making, 
or forging, the electric arc produces heat more intense than 
any other at the chemist's disposal (Fig. 40). This heat is 
preferable to that of flame in that it can be carried into 
a crucible through almost impermeable walls of chalk or 
gypsum, so as to be free from the loss by radiation inevi- 
table to a blaze. When a molten 



Fig. 39. 
Water-tank electric forge. 




core of metal is surrounded by a cake ;j^ 
of ore of low conductivity, tempera- 
tures may be reached, and effects Electric' furnace. 

produced, impossible to crucibles ^ and ^, carbon electrodes ; 

heated from outside. ' ^^^' 

Carborundum is one of the recent creations of the electric 
crucible. This compound of carbon and silicon ranks next 
to the diamond in hardness, and has, therefore, high value 
as an abrasive. Its vitrified grinding-wheels employ porce- 
lain as a bond ; a little iron effects direct union between the 



CARBORUNDUM 



"5 



porcelain and the carborundum particles; they cut the 
hardest steel so quickly as not to case-harden or draw the 
temper of a tool, the metal is brought to an edge before it 
has time to be heated. Carborundum has a wide variety 
of other uses: it grinds and polishes granite; it turns out 
steel balls for bicycle and other bearings ; it makes the rolls 
through which pulp is squeezed in paper-mills, it smooths 
the biscuit-ware in potteries. This new substitute for em- 
ery and corundum is manufactured at Niagara Falls on a 
huge scale from coke, sand, salt, and sawdust, materials 
strangely different from their offspring. When one-half of 
I per cent, of carborundum is added to steel, the metal 
becomes more fluid and ductile, with escape from the risks 
of honeycomb. Mr. E. G. Acheson, who invented the 
carborundum furnace, has recently adapted electric tem- 
peratures to the production of graphite from bituminous 
coal. Graphite as a product of the mine has long been used 
for pencils, for crucibles, and as a lubricant. The carbons 
employed by the chemist as his electrodes in the manufac- 
-ture of alkalis and other compounds, and by the engineer 
for his dynamo- and motor-brushes, are lengthened in life 
many times when graphitised by the Acheson method. 
Another product of electric heat which is fast rising into 
commercial importance is carbide of calcium, manufactured 
from quick-lime and coke. When placed in water, this 
compound sets free acetylene, a gas of high illuminating 
power, rich in photographic rays. 

Professor Henri Moissan, in his electric furnace, has 
brought forth a series of perfectly crystallised compounds, 
borides, silicides, and carbides of metals which, from their 
demand for the fiercest natal heat, are believed to represent 
the foundation-stones of our planet. Compounds, such as 
those of chromium and tungsten, of a refractoriness which 
defies every other furnace, are readily separated by Pro- 
fessor Moissan in his electric crucibles, while silicon and 



ii6 ELECTRIC HEAT 

carbon are volatilised, and lime, zirconia, and silica are sub- 
limed without difficulty. In the reduction of highly resis- 
tant compounds recourse is had, as in the case of fire, to the 
presence of carbon, which, by its intense affinity for oxygen, 
promotes the chemical separation. 

As M. Moissan one day pondered the fact that small 
diamonds are sometimes found in meteoric iron, he asked. 
Can their creation in similar metal be repeated? He rea- 
soned that the meteorite had probably sustained great pres- 
sure as well as a high temperature, and that both conjoined 
had given birth to these little gems. He endeavoured to 
recall in the laboratory what had probably occurred in the 
history of the aerolite. Boiling a crucible of iron in his 
electric furnace, he dropped into the seething mass a goodly 
lump of carbon in the form of coke ; it was dissolved as 
greedily as sugar is by hot tea. He then placed masses of 
the molten mixture in cold water; suddenly shrunken as 
they were, an intense pressure was exerted by the outer 
part of each mass upon its core. When all had cooled 
down he had succeeded in making some minute diamonds ; 
the path of nature in the production of the gems of the 
mine had been clearly retraced. Fortunately for the 
owners of such mines, the electric method has not yet pro- 
duced any stones large enough to be precious in a com- 
mercial sense. 

M. Moissan has further devised a plan for separating 
calcium from its compounds, which may have an important 
bearing upon agriculture. He finds that calcium enters 
readily into combination with nitrogen, and that from the 
nitride so formed it is easy to make ammonia. If con- 
ducted on a scale sufficiently large, this process of the lab- 
oratory may pass to the manufactory, and prove cheap 
enough to supersede all other modes of obtaining a capital 
fertiliser. 

The intense flame of the blowpipe, so readily directed 



A TWO-EDGED SWORD 



117 




Fig. 41. 
Electric blowpipe. 



hither and thither, has its counterpart in an electrical device 
due, in its original form, to Dr. Zorener of Berlin. He 
noticed that an electric arc can be deflected by a strong 
magnet much as a common blowpipe responds to the 
breath. In Fig. 41 an electromagnet D 
pushes out, as if by a light breeze, the arc 
formed between the two carbon poles B 
and C. Lieutenant Jarvis Patton draws 
attention to the perfect control of an arc 
which such an electromagnet affords. 
When an arc has fused part of a metallic 
charge In a crucible or furnace, it has di- 
minished, by aggregation, the resistance 
of that particular portion of the whole 
mass, and because Its path just there is 
freer than elsewhere it continues to tra- 
verse it idly and uselessly. Directed by a magnet, the 
arc may now be shifted to fresh surfaces of material where 
its action is most required.^ 

When the metallurgist dismisses flame in favour of elec- 
tric heat an old annoyance takes its departure. Castings 
made in the ordinary way are exposed to the air and often 
contam blow-holes, while they lack homogeneity and sharp- 
ness. When the metals are fused and cast by electricity 
in a vacuum, these defects disappear and a new perfection 
both of substance and surface is attained. 

Electricity has a parting power which it retains in the 
presence of heat, even of heat which It may itself have 
created ; electricity, therefore, when 
added to heat, hands the chemist a two- a Twofold Disjoiner. 
edged sword of irresistible cleaving 
might. Armed with it, he disjoins fused salts as a flourish- 
ing industry, so that elements once rare and costly are 
marketed at prices low and steadily falling. Aluminium, 

^ Electrical World, October 22, 1898. 



ii8 ELECTRIC HEAT 

discovered by Wohler in 1828, was for fifty years so scarce 
and dear as to be formed into jewellery; to-day the metal 
is cheap enough to find a ready sale as kitchen ware. 
Other metals and metalloids now surrendering themselves 
to the joint attack of heat and electricity are nickel, 
sodium, phosphorus, and glucinum. The last-named of 
these, glucinum, or beryllium, has remarkable qualities. 
It is lighter than aluminium, is not oxidised in any ordi- 
nary exposure, while its electrical conductivity exceeds 
that of copper. If its production should be constantly 
cheapened, as has been the case with aluminium, this valu- 
able metal would find extensive employment in the arts. 

As with elements, so with compounds of equal industrial 
importance. In the Acker process now employed at 
Niagara Falls, caustic soda is obtained from a molten 
electrolyte instead of from a solution of ordinary tem- 
perature. The current required is greater than where 
brine is decomposed, because the electrolyte is kept in a 
molten state by the very current which also decomposes it. 
But this additional cost is more than offset by the fact that 
the caustic soda is obtained directly in an anhydrous state 
ready for the market, obviating the evaporating and boil- 
ing-down process heretofore essential. 

Useful as electric heat is to the metal-worker and the 
chemist, may it not be equally so to that large public who 

employ heat in every-day tasks of 
The Field for Conquest, warming and cooking? To answer this 

question, let us approach an electrolier 
bearing upon its branches twelve incandescent lamps, each 
of sixteen-candle power, such as are usually employed at a 
desk or in a workshop. To supply these lamps with cur- 
rent one horse-power is being consumed at the central 
lighting-station near by, and yet as one holds one's hand 
above the bulbs their warming effect is no greater than if 
three or four ordinary candles were alight. 



FLAME SUPPLANTED 119 

In applying heat to the generation of mechanical power 
we have already noted how serious are the wastes. In the 
very highest efficiency on record the losses are nearly 
80 per cent. ; in ordinary cases they exceed 90 per cent. 
When this large deduction is taken into account it is 
clear that, except for minor uses, the employment of 
electricity for warming and cooking is usually quite out 
of the question. To warm a street-car by electricity is 
economical because the car is of dimensions so contracted 
that but little heat suffices, while the space a stove would 
occupy is left free to hold a passenger. In cooking for an 
invalid, where slight extra cost need not be considered, 
electricity answers better than fire. One of the theatres 
in London has been warmed by electricity since 1894; its 
auditorium is small, and a comparatively slight rise in tem- 
perature is enough for the needs of an English winter. 

Where electricity can be produced very cheaply by water- 
power, we are shown what may be expected from a current 
should it ever be as cheaply derived from coal. At the Car- 
melite Hospice, on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, a cur- 
rent of seventy-five horse-power is bought for heating pur- 
poses at a rate equal to but $5 a year per horse-power. In 
winter, when heating is in request, the dynamos are not in 
demand for the railroad work which occupies them in 
summer. 

Electric heat, as here supplied, is incomparably superior 
to flame : it can be turned on or off by a touch ; it is safe 
as no other heat is safe ; it is unaccompanied by smoke or 
dust; all its appliances are as portable as a hand-lamp ; and 
an automatic regulator may control its temperature and 
adjust it either to simmering a bowl of gruel or baking a 
joint. Just so soon as electricity can be won from fuels 
with an approach to full efficiency, mankind will enter upon 
the ideal, and probably the ultimate, means of heating and 
cooking. 



120 ELECTRIC HEAT 

Burdened though it is by the heavy tolls of the steam- 
engine, electricity has plainly entered the lists of art as a 

multiplier of all the gifts of flame. Heat, 

Flame whcn it spriugs from an electric source. 

Supplanted. j^^g g^ range of applicability denied to 

fire. It goes where fire is refused admit- 
tance and there does its work with unparalleled efficiency. 
Electric heat creates new temperatures, has a nicety 
and certainty of touch all its own ; joining hands with 
the decomposing power of the furnace, it redoubles all 
the triumphs of that old invention. Because electric 
heat is in so many ways preferable to flame, it has sup- 
planted it in many important fields, and would supersede 
it in every other were it producible with economy. Let 
electricity spring from fuels with but inconsiderable loss 
and we shall see them used for little else than to create 
electric currents, so much preferable in their heating effects 
to fire. 

Until this generation flame alone was the source not only 
of heat, but of the beam of candle, lamp, arid gas-jet. 
We are thus led to consider electricity as a hght-bringer, in 
which role it once again plays the part of a supplanter. 



CHAPTER X 

ELECTRIC LIGHT 

IN the sparks which were among the first observed 
effects of electricity lay much promise, for all that they 
were too faint and fleeting to be seriously considered as 
sources of light. As soon as frictional 
machines made way for the voltaic bat- New Lamps 

tery there was hope that the new means foroid. 

of producing a current might yield a 
beam constant and bright enough to be worth having. A 
metallic circuit had only to be broken and rejoined to emit 
a succession of brilliant sparks, such as we see sent forth 
to-day from the trolley-wheel as it jolts away from its wire. 
But, as in so many other high services, carbon was to prove 
itself in possession of qualities denied to any other element. 
In 1810, Humphry Davy, at the Royal Institution in 
London, made two pieces of carbon the terminals of a bat- 
tery of two thousand cells ; he withdrew these carbons by 
three inches of space, to find the gap between them spanned 
by a briUiant arc of Hght — the parent beam of every arc- 
lamp that has since shone forth. In common with 
other offspring of electricity, this sunlike ray was very 
costly in the early days when zinc was its fuel, so that it 
was little known beyond the walls of a laboratory or a lec- 
ture-room. With the cheap current due to the dynamo 
the arc-light at once sprang into popularity, as its auto- 

121 



122 ELECTRIC LIGHT 

matic regulation was slowly perfected by a succession of 
inventors, while its carbon rods were brought at last to a 
high standard of purity and trustworthiness. Among the 
men who have simplified the mechanism of arc-lighting, 
the chief is Mr. Charles F. Brush of Cleveland. 

In its conversion of energy into light the arc-lamp is the 
most effective of all devices, rising as it does to an efficiency 
of 13 per cent., as compared with 5 per cent, on the 
part of the incandescent bulb. Petroleum, in a lamp of 
the best design, has a luminous efficiency of but 2 per 
cent., a sperm candle li per cent., a gas-flame burning 
5^ cubic feet an hour, with a Welsbach mantle, 2ro 
per cent. The light from illuminating gas may be 
doubled if, instead of burning it in ordinary jets, the 
gas is employed to drive a gas-engine, an electric cur- 
rent derived therefrom being sent into incandescent 
lamps. In the house of the American Society of Civil 
Engineers, New York, five hundred incandescent lamps 
are maintained from a gas-engine at a cost for fuel and 
attendance about one-half that of a street current. In 
such an installation the electrician exhibits the audacity 
of a supplanter, employing an electric spark to ignite the 
successive charges in the cylinder of gas and air of his 
engine. 

The arc-light, for all that its economy is more than 
double that of the incandescent bulb, has serious disad- 
vantages. It cannot be produced on a small scale, and 
is therefore too brilliant for ordinary rooms ; and as its rays 
are sent forth from a single point, they form shadows of 
sharp and unpleasant definition. An opal globe, in redu- 
cing the glare of an arc-lamp, absorbs as much as 45 to 65 
per cent, of the rays, a large subtraction from the value of 
the device. In considering these objections it was remem- 
bered that the electric current had long been bringing the 
short metal wires of the miner's fuse to glowing radiance : 



RESEMBLES A BLAZE 123 

why not copy that contrivance so as to obtain a moderate 
light from a continuous conductor, free from the necessity 
for any regulating mechanism ? The question was easy to 
ask, but before it was rightly answered there was much to 
learn. 

A blazing pine-knot or the glowing embers of a hearth 
have, in their time, enabled a good many men and women 
to continue their tasks of the day, to 
read their books, to write their letters, xhe incandescent 
to knit and sew. Primitive though such Lamp, 

illumination may be, it has something in 
common with the beam of the incandescent lamp. Let 
the coals of a grate be shining a dull red, send a quick 
draught of air upon them from a pair of bellows, and 
forthwith they glow vividly. A comparatively small eleva- 
tion of temperature is accompanied by a remarkable in- 
crease of Hght. This was borne out in a discouraging way 
in the early experiments with metals intended to yield light 
when white-hot. Before iron, platinum, or iridium could 
be brought to a satisfactory radiance, the intensity of elec- 
tric heat had softened or even melted the wire. 

In 1 841 it occurred to Frederick de Moleyn, an English- 
man, that improvement lay in inclosing the metallic wire 
in a glass bulb from which nearly all the air had been ex- 
hausted. His device had merit, but did not overcome the 
whole difficulty. Two of its advantages were clear : it pre- 
served his wire from oxidation, and when platinum was em- 
ployed there could be no troublesome absorption by its 
surface of atmospheric gases. The main fault lay in the 
use of any metal at all as the substance to be set aglow; 
and yet, because his vacuous bulb is essential to the incan- 
descent lamp of to-day, De Moleyn deserves to be remem- 
bered as among the men who have made that lamp possible. 

An American inventor, J. W. Starr, saw what was the 
matter with De Moleyn's contrivance. He knew that car- 



124 



ELECTRIC LIGHT 



bon was giving a superb light in the arc-lamp, and he felt 
certain that the same element could be substituted with 
profit for metallic wires. In association with King, an 
Englishman, he produced a lamp which in essence is the 
lamp of to-day, employing a slender rod of car- 
bon, A, clamped at its ends to metalHc conduc- 
tors, C and Dy and placed in a vacuum above the 
mercury in a barometer tube (Fig. 42). 

This rod of the Starr-King lamp was slender, 
but not slender enough. When the dynamo 
cheapened electricity so much as to revive inter- 
est in the invention, it became clear that it was 
not a rod that was needed, but a mere thread or 
fibre. For the discovery and treatment of suit- 
able forms of carbon, and for the mechanical re- 
finements requisite for complete success in their 
use, the principal credit is due to Thomas Alva 
Edison. The quest for proper filaments occupied 
him for years and demanded the most generous 
Fig. 42. outlay. Every characteristic North American 
First in- fibre was tested in vain, and explorers were de- 
candescent gpatched to Brazil, to Africa, to gather other 
fibres in the widest variety. At the end of many 
thousand experiments, finely divided and shaped strips of 
bamboo gave gratifying results. 

Further success came to him, to J. W. Swan of New- 
castle-on-Tyne, and to other inventors, when art as well as 
nature was laid under contribution. Paper and threads of 
cotton and silk were charred with scrupulous care, while 
carbon of the finest grain reduced to powder was moulded 
into delicate threads under severe pressure. The chemists 
were next enlisted ; for what is chemistry but the me- 
chanics of the atom instead of the mass? Pure cellulose 
was dissolved in zinc chloride, and forced through narrow 
dies into alcohol, which transformed it to a solid thread. 




FILAMENTS PERFECTED 125 

Celluloid was suitably bathed, modified, and shaped into 
filaments for a carbonising process. These and similar 
methods, some of them trade secrets, are to-day producing 
lamp-threads of high merit, each adapted to its particular 
line of duty, and superseding bamboo. 

At first no filament lasted for more than fifty hours of 
service, making the cost of renewing lamps as great as the 
expense of current. In casting about for the cause of this 
lamentable mortality it was noticed that the filaments 
glowed more brightly at some points than at others, indi- 
cating a variation in their thickness. Could a remedy be 
found by making them of uniform diameter? Fortunately, 
yes. Several years before that time, M. Duprez, a French 
chemist, had recorded one of those observations so com- 
mon in science, which at first seem merely curious, but 
which afterward point a way out of some pressing difficulty. 
He remarked that in an atmosphere of hydrocarbon a 
heated stick of carbon received upon its surface a deposit 
of an extremely dense form of the same element. Sawyer 
and Mann here found a capital means of lengthening the life 
of the filament. Immersing it while luminous in a heavy 
hydrocarbon gas or Hquid, it took on a solid coating, and 
where the filament was thinnest, and therefore hottest, the 
deposit became thickest. In this ingenious way the thread 
was bidden to repair its own defects, and took a bound 
toward virtual perfection. The squirted filaments of to-day 
receive in a similar manner a dense coating of graphitic 
carbon, at once more durable and more light-giving than its 
basis of amorphous carbon. 

To a further refinement of ingenuity the incandescent 
lamp owes another feature of its excellence. To be efficient 
it is needful that the air be excluded as thoroughly as pos- 
sible from its bulb. Any oxygen that remains will combine 
at once with the carbon of the thread to shorten its life. Not- 
withstanding his use of the best pumps, Mr. Swan detected 



126 ELECTRIC LIGHT 

that his filaments were attacked by oxygen, and in a quan- 
tity greater than could possibly remain in a bulb after the 
well-nigh complete exhaustion of its air. It occurred to 
him that perchance a little oxygen had been left in the 
substance of the filament itself, for he well knew how 
strong is the affinity between gases and the porous forms 
of carbon. It is this occluding or hiding power which 
gives charcoal its usefulness in preserving foods by absorp- 
tion of deleterious gases. Thought he, It may be that if the 
filament were kept aglow during the pumping operation, 
its oxygen would be dislodged and removed with the free 
air of the bulb. Experiment proved the soundness of his 
surmise, and lamp-making was advanced by another im- 
portant step. To-day a chemical absorption of the air 
from a lamp occupies one minute; at first for this task a 
pump required five hours. 

In passing the wires bearing a current through the glass 
of a lamp, a perplexing difficulty arose. As those wires 
were warmed and cooled when a current was established or 
cut off, they tended to tear themselves away from the glass 
in which they were embedded. This was overcome on dis- 
covering that platinum when heated has much the same 
rate of expansibility as glass. Who shall say that the 
ascertaining any property of matter whatever is mere idle 
curiosity ? When a particular substance is wanted, a work 
of reference, such as Clarke's Constants of Nature^ is an in- 
ventory which may tell us exactly where to find what we 
need. The tiny bit of platinum has been indispensable to 
the incandescent lamp, and the demands of the electrician, 
as in the case of copper, have had a decided effect on the 
price of the metal. Because the glass which the platinum 
enters is very strong it may be thin, so that a very short 
wire of the costly metal suffices. Recent experiments with 
an alloy of nickel and steel show it to have much the same 
rate of expansion and contraction as glass when exposed to 



INCANDESCENCE 127 

heat and cold ; this alloy, therefore, may prove to be avail- 
able as a conductor for incandescent lamps instead of 
platinum. 

In augmenting the light to be had from a given current, 
two paths are open to the inventor. He may either in- 
tensify the current, and be rewarded as if he were to work 
the bellows on his hearth that he may read by the light of 
its flame, or he may choose a substance which shines with 
peculiar brilliancy when brought to a very high tempera- 
ture. This twofold quest is surrounded with difficulties. 
In lamps of the latest type the filament is stout enough to 
bear a current of from 200 to 250 volts, with a life usually 
one-third longer than that of lamps adapted to a current of 
1 10 volts. But there is a limit to the heat which even the 
most refractory substances will bear, and of this we have an 
illustration not infrequently. Sometimes an accident at 
headquarters sends a current of double voltage through the 
filament of a lamp ; for a few seconds the thread glows with 
eightfold its former intensity, and we are tempted to think 
that here is a way of getting vastly more light out of elec- 
tricity than we have ever had yet. But the thought has 
scarcely time to pass through the mind before the filament 
breaks under the strain of a temperature close to its point 
of fusion. Within the narrow bounds of experiment it has 
been ascertained that a threefold current exerts a twenty- 
sevenfold power of illumination — that the exaltation of 
light is as the cube of increase in the current applied. 
Plainly, the electrician is here rigidly fenced in by the melt- 
ing-points of the materials he sets aglow. 

But among these materials there may be some which 
exceed carbon in radiant quality, and it is along this line 
that inquiry is now directed. One of the best illuminants is 
the oxyhydrogen flame as it plays upon a block of lime; a 
light of yet greater brilliancy bursts forth as magnesium 
burns to form magnesia. Both these facts may have had 



128 



ELECTRIC LIGHT 



a hint for Auer von Welsbach when he entered upon the 
researches in which he has won distinction. In his incan- 
descent mantles for Argand burners a gas-flame is doubled 
in light-rays through playing upon a film of oxides, chiefly 
those of thorium and zirconium. In recent experiments he 
has found that threads of osmium, ruthenium, and thoria 
yield an excellent light when conveying an electric current. 
These materials are costly, and their preparation is difficult. 
Yet, with the cheapening which is likely to follow an enlarged 
demand, and the knowledge which rewards persistent and 
concerted attack, it may be that the success of the incan- 
descent mantle with gas is to be repeated with electric 
lighting. Chemistry here has not said its last word. 

On a related line of ex- 
periment, Mr. Edison has 
recently modified the car- 
bon filament of his incan- 
descent lamp so as to adapt 
it for use on high-tension 
currents. This new fila- 
ment is compounded of 
carbon and of rare earths, 
such as the oxide of zir- 
conium or of thorium. 
Following a somewhat similar line of investigation, Pro- 
fessor Walther Nernst of Gottingen has devised a lamp of 
tested utility. Between two platinum 
The Nernst Lamp, springs he placcs a Cylinder formed of any 
substance, such as magnesia, which is re- 
fractory to heat, and at the same time refulgent at a high 
temperature. A cylinder of magnesia at common tempera- 
tures is a poor conductor, but when heated it carries a cur- 
rent with ease. An auxiliary current, or flame, warms the 
magnesia at the outset of its work, and, that done, a strong 
current enters and keeps the cylinder vividly aglow. The 




Fig. 43. 
Nernst lamp. 



CONDUCTORS ABOLISHED 129 

Nernst lamp enjoys all the economy of the arc-lamp, and 
offers the further advantage that it can be manufactured in 
smaller dimensions and serve smaller spaces. How far the 

necessity for beginning by 

.\\\\\\\l I \\ll///A warming its cylinder may 

' ^ work to its disfavour is a 



V/////|1\\\\V^ 

Fig. 44. 
Simple Geissler tube. 



question which only ex- 
perience can decide (Fig. 
43). BB are binding- 
posts through which a cur- 
rent is sent to the two me- 
tallic springs 55, which 
hold^the light-giving body C. The flame of a lamp, D, 
brought under C for a few seconds, warms it to the point 
of conductivity. 

Many attempts have been directed to producing electric 
light by means other than the arc of two carbon pencils, 
the filament or the rod aglow. Tesla, in 
experiments of great interest, has re- Tesia's Experiments, 
turned to the original phase of illumina- 
tion as due to pulses of extreme intensity. We can follow 
his successive steps if we begin with a common Geissler 
tube, almost exhausted of air, its electrodes, or current car- 
riers, extended just within . 
the glass (Fig. 44)- On \\\\\\\\ |l ///// 
sending an alternating cur- 
rent of high intensity 

through the tube from one ^''/'/y // ! ] \ \<>^ 

electrode to the other, the 
gas commences to gleam, 
and through a spectroscope 
its characteristic lines and bands come clearly into view. In 
a second and similar tube the electrodes may remain outside 
the glass, but in contact w^th it, while the luminous effect 
continues unabated (Fig. 45). The electrodes may be re- 




FiG. 45. 
Geissler tube with extei-nal electrodes. 



130 



ELECTRIC LIGHT 




Fig. 46. 

Glass sphere luminous between 

two metal plates. 



moved farther and farther from the tube, and may finally 
be soldered to large sheets of metal forming walls as much 
as fifteen feet apart; with pulses of redoubled tension any- 
where within these walls, the tubes or globes, exhausted as 
before, may be waved about while they continue to shine 
vividly. No electrical experiment is more astonishing than 

this, accustomed as we are to 
supposing that for a luminous 
effect a metallic tie is imperative 
(Fig. 46). 

In large exhausted tubes Mr. 
D. Macfarlan Moore converts 
night to day with a brilliant and 
continuous band of light similar 
in origin. Franklin identified the 
spark of the Leyden jar with 
the lightning of the sky ; Geissler, Tesla, and Moore have 
shown that the aurora borealis and the rays from a rapid 
alternating machine are one and the same. As yet the 
aurora of mechanical birth is too costly to take a place in 
the market beside the arc and incandescent lamps. In 
demonstrating that a gas, without rising in temperature, 
may be lashed by electricity to all the glow of flame, the 
artificial aurora sheds a ray of explanation on the aurora 
of nature, and points the way to that desideratum of elec- 
tric art — light without the present enormous waste attend- 
ing its production. 

To the eyes of early observers light was always associated 
with heat, and the auroras of the upper air, as well as the 
nebulae of the remotest heavens, were deemed to be hot like 
the stars, simply because they shone with brightness in the 
sky. Recent and critical examination discloses that both 
auroras and nebulae are probably intensely cold — a degree 
or two,^^ perhaps, above absolute zero. Within the past 
decade attention has been turned to living examples on 




THE UNAPPROACHED FIREFLY 131 

earth of light generated without heat as a companion. 
The glow-worm, low as it is in the scale of life, accom- 
plishes the feat. So in more striking fashion does the fire- 
fly, especially in the large species Pyrophorus noctihictiSy 
which flourishes in Cuba (Fig. 
47).^ In music, as Lord Ray- 
leigh points out, we may strike 
the higher octaves at once, 
and strike them only, but in 
reaching the upper octaves of 
the molecular music we call 
light, we must bear the com- 

CvibdiXi^re^y {Fyrophoncsnoctihcctis). 

pany of the lower scale of heat, 

however costly, useless, and offensive it may be. The elec- 
trical engineer has only to read the secret of the glow-worm 
and the firefly, as they shine in his path, to find his goal in 
the full conversion of the energy of his fuel into light. 

Energy in the heat of a steam-boiler as applied to pro- 
ducing electric light rarely rises to an efficacy of as much 
as one-hundredth part; and yet, for all 
their waste, electric lamps mark the The Gifts of Electric 
longest stride ever taken in the art of Lighting, 

illumination. The beams of the arc-light 
abound in the full variety of rays to which the sun has ac- 
customed the eye, while the proportion of light to heat is 
much greater than in any other artificial illuminant. In its 
*' inclosed " types, usually of moderate dimensions, the arc- 
lamp yields rays resembling those of daylight in their 
diffusion, while the inclosing globe abolishes all peril from 
detached particles of flaming carbon, or the accidental 
touching of the carbon rods by inflammable materials. 
Other advantages are enjoyed. An ordinary arc-lamp is 

1 An elaborate study of the light of this insect appears in a paper, "On the 
Cheapest Form of Light," by S. P. Langley and F. W. Very, A??iertcan Jour- 
nal of Science, Vol. XL, August, 1890. 



132 ELECTRIC LIGHT 

operated by a current of 45 volts ; an inclosed lamp of the 
** Helios " pattern employs a current of 80 volts, so that its 
carbons are farther apart, with a broader path for the emis- 
sion of light. The pencils occupy a small glass cylinder 
closed at the base ; the air in this cylinder becomes intensely 
hot, and is correspondingly attenuated, with the effect that 
its oxygen attacks the carbons much less than the oxygen of 
the open air attacks the pencils of a common arc-lamp. 
The regulation of a '' Helios " exhibits a return from com- 
plexity to simplicity : two electromagnets are directly en- 
ergised by the lighting current ; at its full strength that 
current by means of a lever draws the carbons apart ; when 
the current grows weak the lever relaxes its grasp and 
permits the carbons to approach. 

When manufactured in its boldest proportions, the in- 
tensity of the arc-lamp has created for it a new field. 
Mounted upon a tower on land or at sea, it is a search-light 
of golden value in both peace and war, disclosing in the 
one case a path of safety to the mariner, in the other mak- 
ing as clear as sunshine the best line for attack. By 
using it for throwing signals upon the clouds, according to 
a code, during the South African campaign in 1899 mes- 
sages were read between Kimberley and Phillipstown, a 
distance of 115 miles. The Suez Canal is navigable by 
night as easily as by day, thanks to the arc-lamps of its 
steamers. In a very different field, an electric search- 
light has just been impressed into the service of the fire 
department of New York, making clear the best points for 
work by the corps. 

The incandescent lamp, by comparison feeble, is never- 
theless, in the sum total of its uses, more important than the 
arc-light. Shut up inside its empty bulb, it neither con- 
sumes nor pollutes the air. As comparatively little heat 
attends it, and because it is strictly secluded from the at- 
mosphere, it is safe where any other light would be hazard- 



BLESSINGS MANIFOLD 133 

ous, as in gunpowder-magazines, in collieries liable to 
fire-damp, and in flour- mills where a fine explosive dust 
rises from the machinery. Its use banishes the match, 
from which so large a number of *' accidental " fires arise. ^ 

It goes where no other light can go : under water as an 
aid to the fisherman and the diver; beneath a balloon, or 
within it, as a signaller a thousand feet or more above the 
ground ; while the surgeon introduces it into the throat 
or stomach of a patient to explore the tract of disease. 
Armed with an automatic appliance easily actuated by elec- 
tricity, a light may be left to itself in full confidence that it 
will be maintained, for on the instant of accidental extinc- 
tion a neighbouring lamp is set aglow. 

Now that houses, concert-halls, and theatres are lighted 
by electricity, their air is much less impure than when gas 
was employed, and because less ventilation is necessary 
than of old, there is a lessened demand for heating in 
winter, with a diminished play of baleful draughts. An 
eminent musical critic of New York declares that to-day 
we live in the golden age of song. This is without doubt 
to be credited in part to the electrician, who provides 
singers, musicians, and conductors with much better air 
than they ever enjoyed before the era of electric illumina- 
tion. The same good atmosphere bestows upon the 
contents of libraries, picture-galleries, and museums a 
lengthened lease of life. In the mansion electric lighting 
confers upon decorative art a new and delightful resource ; 
in the theatre it gives the stage-manager instant and easy 
control of hundreds of lamps scattered in front of and be- 
hind his drop-curtain ; it grants him a simulation of dawn, 

1 During the year 1898 the total number of fires in Boston was 1980. 

Caused by matches and rats 30 

Caused by matches and children 00.... 78 

Caused by careless use of matches .... , 107 

215 



134 ELECTRIC. LIGHT 

of moonlight, and of storm unknown before the electric 
age. 

Electricity has thus entered the domain of light as a 
multiplier not less potent than in the field of heat. It re- 
duces the waste attending the production of light from 
fuels, grievous though that waste continues to be. It 
brings illumination to a new intensity, and therefore to a 
new field. It promotes cleanliness, safety, and health. 
As it can be divided into small units with the utmost ease, 
it affords the engineer a new facility in distribution. The 
first arc-lamps, powerful as they were, needed an elaborate 
system of lenses and reflectors to give their rays a useful 
diffusion. With incandescent bulbs arrived a better 
method. Their wire may turn a corner every foot for 
miles, and, none the worse, yield a sufficient beam at every 
rod of the journey. To borrow a phrase from the mathe- 
maticians, electricity raises all the old arts of lighting to a 
new power, and creates, as we shall presently note, a beam 
with powers denied even to the solar ray. 



CHAPTER XI 

ELECTRIC BATTERIES 

IN the fields of electric heat and light we have seen how 
electricity began by doing an old task in a better way 
than fire ever did it, and then passed to the performance 
of work quite beyond the scope of fire, 

however well directed. The history of ^he Primary Battery 

the voltaic battery repeats all this. In a"'^ the Eiectropiater. 
its original form this device was offensive 
and irregular in its action, short-lived and dear. Its best 
modern types emit no odours, give an equable current, cost 
but little when at work and nothing at all when idle. For 
many purposes, where a small current is enough, and its use 
infrequent, as in ringing a door-bell or touching off a fuse, 
the voltaic battery is not likely to lose its place. But it is 
rather in its offspring than in itself that this primary bat- 
tery has claims to distinction. 

This was indicated early in its history. It was noticed 
by the first experimenters that its processes of wasting 
away could be readily reversed, that if a current from one 
cell were led into another, it was easy in the second cell to 
obtain a deposit of solid metal from its solution. Thus 
electroplating was discovered, and tasks long accomplished 
only by fire were handed over to electricity. Before 1840, 
silver plate was made by soldering a thin plate of silver to 
a sheet of copper, which was then rolled out and shaped 

US 



136 ELECTRIC BATTERIES 

into cups, bowls, and pitchers. A similar method of man- 
ufacture survives in the Crooke process, by which lead-foil 
is surfaced with tin as a damp-proof lining for packages 
and an impervious covering for corks and stoppers. 

The results achieved by the electroplater are much more 
refined and delicate than those possible to fire. Heat 
causes an expansion in metals which seriously interferes 
with nicety of execution, which often demands in a coating 
of gold or silver much more metal than when the filrn is 
deposited from an electrolytic solution. The contrast be- 
tween old methods and new is very striking in the manu- 
facture of "galvanised" iron. The original plan was to 
dip iron into molten zinc. This process is now being re- 
placed by immersion in a cool, electrolytic cell in which the 
zinc is deposited in a closely adherent film, smooth in sur- 
face and exactly uniform in thickness ; the zinc, united to 
the iron in the molten bath, has not the same excellence. 

To prepare solutions which give the electroplater the 
best results with his various metals has been a prolonged 
and difficult undertaking. To deposit a film of silver suc- 
cessfully the metal must be of close coherent texture ; only 
at the end of many and costly failures was it ascertained 
that silver of durable grain is to be had only from its solu- 
tion in cyanide of potassium. The deposition of nickel was 
for years a baffling problem until Isaac Adams of Boston 
found that nickel salts were usually contaminated by nitrate 
of soda; when this intruder was ousted there was little 
further difficulty, and to-day stoves, cutlery, and hardware 
of great variety are given a tough and handsome coating 
in the nickel bath. With modified solutions of copper, 
zinc, nickel, and silver, adherent coverings of these metals 
have been given to wood, vulcanised fibre, and hard rub- 
ber. The wooden handles of tools and instruments ex- 
posed by turns to wetness and dryness may thus be rendered 
durable with no sacrifice of lightness. Ornamental carv- 



THE FOUNDRY OUTDONE 137 

ings and mouldings are in like manner given a strong and 
beautiful shield of metal. On occasion the bath may be of 
huge proportions, as in one of the boldest tasks ever essayed 
by the electroplater — in adding a surface of aluminium 
to the metal which afterward rose as the dome of the City 
Hall in Philadelphia. The total area treated was 120,000 
square feet, and included masses weighing 10,000 pounds. 

The ship-builder is not negligent of the value of electro- 
plating. The steam-tug Assistance, of the United States 
navy, is a vessel whose iron plates were electroplated with 
copper early in 1895. During four years of constant ser- 
vice her plates remained free from barnacles or marine 
growths of any kind. In cost this process is considerably 
less than that of ordinary copper sheathing. 

One of the prime uses of fire to the savage was in the 
casting of metals. It was an immense saving of time and 
strength when, instead of having to beat 

a mass of copper into the shape of a club a Rival of the Foundry. 

or a hammer, he found out how to fuse 
the metal in a blaze, pour it into a mould, and let it cool. 
All that the savage ever accomplished in thus making fuel 
do his work was vastly extended and lifted as the arts of the 
metal-worker rose to more and more of skill and deftness. 
Early in the development of the voltaic cell these ancient 
arts of the founder were obliged to face rivalry from an 
unexpected quarter, for the electrician soon passed from the 
enrichment or protection of surfaces to the dupHcation of 
an entire object. At first, of course, small things were the 
means of showing what the new agent could do. For ex- 
ample, a medal would be copied by taking a mould of it in 
wax or plaster of Paris and dusting this carefully with a 
conducting film of plumbago ; on immersion in a suitable 
bath, after attaching the mould to the positive pole of a bat- 
tery, the original was accurately reproduced. Here for 
the first time was deliverance from some of the evils at- 



138 ELECTRIC BATTERIES 

tending the use of fire for such a task. Because there was 
no expansion due to heat the reproduction was exact in its 
every hne, there was no burning with its HabiHties of injury 
and discoloration, and the operator did his work without 
inconvenience from the glare of flame or the temperature 
necessary to fusion. 

It was not long before the electrical mode of duplication 
was extended to pages of printers' type, for which moulds 
of gutta-percha are found to be best. In like manner 
etched and engraved plates are faithfully multiplied. The 
gain in all this is that the originals are copied with the 
utmost precision, while they are preserved in their first 
perfection free from the touch of ink and the abrasion of 
the press. Electrotypes cheaply made are renewed as soon 
as they show signs of wear, and the modern printer's high 
standard of execution thus owes not a little to the electri- 
cian's aid. Thanks to electrotypy, not only, ordinary illus- 
trated works, but atlases and maps, are now issued in large 
editions at a fraction of their former cost. The engraved 
maps of the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain are never 
directly used in the press ; at stated intervals in their con- 
stant revision they are handed to the electroplater to be 
copied and published at low prices. 

To-day with the cheap current from the dynamo the 
electrician rises to bolder flights than these. No longer 
does he treat mere surfaces for the silversmith, or thin 
plates for the printer, but takes in hand the clay model of 
the sculptor, large and irregular in its mass, for exquisite 
duplication. In materials impervious to liquids, and highly 
elastic, he forms a mould of a bust or a group ; when a 
metallic deposit is secured, the mould is easily removed. 
Or, he may repeat one of the steps of the casting process, 
and make his mould in several parts. The statue of San 
Fidele, at Palazzolo sull' Oglio, Italy, was thus produced in 
seventeen sections. It stands 23 feet in height as it sur- 



AID TO THE SCULPTOR 



139 




mounts the Torre del Popolo ; as Its plates are but one- 
fifth of an inch thick, its weight is but i 760 pounds. An- 
other striking example of 
the same feat is the Gut- 
enberg monument at 
Frankfort - on - the - Main, 
whose three life-sized 
figures, created by R. 
Schmidt von der Launitz, 
sprang not from foundry 
flasks, but from the elec- 
tric bath (Fig. 48). Let 
the current become still 
cheaper than it is to-day, 
and the founder may see 
the whole of his business 
transferred to this for- 
midable rival, the warping 
heats of sand-moulds ban- 
ished, the scorching tem- 
peratures of crucible and ladle a reminiscence, 
see flame outsped, its feats surpassed. 

The ability to effect chemical separation without heat lifts 
the latch to a numerous array of industrial processes. It 
brings to that venerable contrivance, the 
smelting-furnace, a new and unforeseen smelting Finds a com- 

_ , . r ^ 1 r petitor and the Miner 

competitor. In the important held of saves Much, 

dissevering metals directly from their 
ores an auspicious beginning is recorded, while about three- 
fourths of all the copper now mined is refined electrolyti- 
cally, furthering the electric arts by handing them con- 
ductors of new purity and efficiency. One of the largest 
works in the world, those of the Boston and Montana Copper 
Company, at Great Falls, Montana, employs in this service 
3000 horse-power, supplied by the Missouri River. The 



Fig. 48. 

Gutenberg statue, 

Frankfort-on-the- Main. 



Again we 



140 



ELECTRIC BATTERIES 



copper ore is first mechanically concentrated, then roasted, 
next smelted into matte and blown into plates ; these are 
suspended in large tanks, filled with a solution mainly com- 
posed of copper sulphate and sulphuric acid. A current 
of feeble intensity and large amount is passed through the 
tanks in succession, and the metal is deposited, as in electro- 
plating, on sheets of copper which thicken rapidly and 
prove to be almost pure. The refuse w^hich falls to the 
bottom of the tanks yields in silver and gold much more 
than enough to pay the cost of the whole refining operation. 

A new source of profit in mining consists in being able 
thus to pick up with electric fingers what a few years ago 
were unconsidered trifles — chiefly because they were beyond 
the play of fiame. To July i, 1898, the Anaconda Cop- 
per Mining Company of Montana had recovered as by- 
products 40,658,103 ounces of silver and 135,244 ounces 
of gold. The gold, in a weak solution of potassium cyanide, 
may be but from 25 to 100 grains in a ton, and yet so efficient 
a searcher is electricity that from such a liquid more than 
46,000 ounces of gold were separated in 1896 in the Trans- 
vaal. No furnace method has so extraordinary an effi- 
ciency. To-day this electrical process is in much extended 
use throughout the world, and so are similar modes of re- 
covering extremely small fractions of silver from ores of 
lead. No wonder, therefore, that ores so poor as to be 
long neglected, and shmes for years cast aside as waste and 
worthless, now receive the chemist's careful study. 

One of the strange facts in this department of his activ- 
ity is that one metal may be easily separated in the pres- 
ence of another ; zinc, for example, is deposited almost 
chemically pure from an ore which also contains lead. 
This is of a piece with the singular fact that in a plating 
bath an alloy, such as brass or bronze, can be deposited as 
an alloy, although with much more difficulty than either 
copper or tin. 



FLAME OUTSPED 141 

A new horizon spread itself before the chemist when 
Davy, in 1807, employed the electric current to decom- 
pose potash and soda, releasing potas- 
sium and sodium for the first time from a Divider and uniter 
their compounds, and accomplishing the for the chemist, 
feat without fire. When heat is applied 
to a solution until the temperature reaches an extreme 
pitch, the usual effect is to evaporate the hquid without 
chemical change. Often, too, the application of extreme 
heat to a solution yields results of an undesirable kind. 
In supplanting heat by electricity the chemist has a part- 
ing agent which does his will at ordinary temperatures, and 
whose products he can determine through an ample range 
of choice. Place a little water in a platinum tube, heat the 
tube intensely, and the water is divided into hydrogen and 
oxygen gases. These gases are diffused as a single mix- 
ture ; they combine to form water once more the instant 
that their heat is permitted to fall below the temperature 
of dissociation. Observe, in contrast, the separation by 
electricity of these same gases. Each of them is now borne 
to a tube or other receiver of its own, all, too, in the ab- 
sence of any heating effect. This fairly typical case shows 
us the new scope which the electric current as a divider 
affords the chemist. From common salt dissolved in water 
Mr. E. A. Le Sueur derives sodium and chlorine. The 
chlorine is divided into two portions; one immediately 
forms caustic soda, the other enters a chamber of lime to 
produce bleaching-powder. The same products are ob- 
tained by a variety of other ingenious processes. A large 
group of chlorates, including potassium chlorate, which is 
both a useful ingredient of explosives and an important 
medical specific, are manufactured by electrolysis ; so are 
chloroform, iodoform, and other resources of the dis- 
pensatory. 

The electrician sets up a partnership not only with the 



142 ELECTRIC BATTERIES 

druggist, but with the sugar-refiner, contributing as his 
share of the capital a refining method so excellent that 
four-fifths of the sugar previously left in the waste liquor is 
now saved. He next assists the tanner, having learned 
that under electrical stimulus liquids have a new power of 
penetrating the hides in their pits. With the aid of a cur- 
rent changed every minute in direction, as much work is 
done in two hours as formerly required from ten days to 
three weeks. 

In the early working of the frictional electrical machine 
a strong odour was remarked, soon ascertained to be due to 
the atmospheric production of ozone — oxygen in an in- 
tensely active form. Ozone is now turned out on factory 
principles at the rate of 135 grammes per hour for every 
horse-power employed. It has widely diversified uses: it 
oxidises oil for the paint trade ; it seasons the floor-cloth 
known as linoleum; it purifies drinking-water; it is an in- 
valuable bleacher, and in the manufacture of sugar its 
bleaching quality reinforces the purifying effect of an elec- 
tric current. In these manifold activities under the hand 
of the chemist he bids electricity do much that is impos- 
sible to flame, however skilful its application. Take the 
production of ozone, for example : a very moderate degree 
of heat speedily brings it to the form of oxygen and so 
destroys its peculiar value. 

Electricity has remarkable powers of effecting chemical 
unions as well as separations, and under circumstances 
where fire must not appear. Cavendish, late. in the eigh- 
teenth century, performed a notable feat when he united 
hydrogen and oxygen by an electric spark to form water. 
To-day methane, ethylene, acetylene, and ethane are each 
combined with oxygen by the same simple agency. As 
the chemist thus beats his electrical sword into a trowel, he 
builds structures prophetic of the day when the slow elab- 
orations of the farm and field may be imitated by the arti- 



METALS AS FUELS 143 

ficial synthesis of sugars, oils, and starch. A variety of 
dyes, oils, and acids, nearly two hundred in number, pro- 
duced in nature as the results of vital activities, are now 
built up from inorganic matter. In an increasing propor- 
tion of cases electricity is the agent which either builds a 
molecule from simpler substances, or disengages a com- 
pound from a structure more complicated than itself. 
Van 't Hoff, in a memorable address delivered in 1898, 
stated that we stand very near the time when the chemist 
will be able to produce albumen in the laboratory. That 
his prophecy is reasonable appears from the researches 
of Schutzenberger, who devoted years to the study of this 
subtile compound, and who found that three out of the four 
molecules into which it may be broken up can be created 
artificially. 

When, in Chapter VII, a word was said about carbon, 
we noted how remarkable a reservoir of energy it is, a 
single pound of it in burning giving forth 
as much heat as would be produced from The storage Battery. 
a horse-power applied for five hours and 
forty-two minutes in tasks of friction or percussion. And 
yet, as reservoirs of energy, fuels of all kinds have their 
disadvantages: they only yield their motive power when 
burned ; to get up steam in a boiler takes time and so 
makes difficult the application of the steam-engine for 
many minor and intermittent demands ; even a gas-engine 
asks a few minutes before its wheels can go round after a 
period of rest and coolness. Metals, for all their excess in 
weight beyond common fuels when energy values are con- 
sidered, offer themselves as reservoirs of motive power pref- 
erable in many ways to heat-engines, however well served 
by fire-wood, coal, or oil. The indication here lay in re- 
marking that a metal as it dissolves in a common acid solution 
generates heat, while the same metal dissolving in a voltaic 
cell gives forth, not heat, but electricity, and this instantly 



144 ELECTRIC BATTERIES 

at a touch, while, when the cell is not at work, its acid 
exerts no corrosive action. 

In the broad field of the electrician, two distinct types of 
apparatus have for many years been familiar : first, a vol- 
taic battery in which metal dissolves and yields a current; 
second, a plating battery in which a current deposits metal 
from its solution. In the details of their action these two 
kinds of apparatus differ radically. For a long time in- 
ventors tried to devise a storage battery which by turns 
would yield a current as its metal dissolves, and anon take 
in a current to build a mass of metal from its solution. The 
problem thus put seems easy, but it has presented obstacles 
so stubborn that only recently have they been overcome. 

The core of the difficulty lies in the fact that dissolving 
a metal in an acid bath is not so simple as it looks, and 
that therefore to reverse the process is an arduous task. 
In the architecture of the molecule, as in that of a house, 
there may be doors of two different sorts. One of them 
swings either forward or backward ; it may be pushed or 
pulled open ; it acts reversibly. Doors of this kind swing 
apart as the chemist decomposes water ; they close behind 
him again as hydrogen and oxygen fly together as water 
once more. Another type of door, much more common, 
is hung like a valve so as to move only in one direction : 
it admits easily enough, but permits no return. Push it 
from the wrong side, and it is shut all the tighter, standing 
typical of an irreversible process in chemistry. To use a 
homely illustration of an irreversible chemical change, let 
us fry an egg over a gas-jet ; no cold, however intense, can 
unfry it, and no electric current, however strong, can restore 
it to its first estate. 

From a change as intricate as that of a cooked egg let 
us pass to one as simple as the decomposition of water — 
we shall find it less simple than it appears at first view. 
When we apply the poles of a battery to initiate the sep- 



WHY LEAD IS BEST 145 

aration, a little sulphuric acid must be present. Many- 
electricians of mark are disposed to think that, from first to 
last, it is nothing but sulphuric acid, re-formed from mo- 
ment to moment, that is affected by the parting. It is 
worth remembering at this point that the action of a vol- 
taic cell is much the better for rubbing its zinc plates with 
mercury. Just why this should be, nobody knows. For 
a successful storage battery, one that works either way 
with ease and economy, no metal pure and simple gives 
satisfactory results. The electrician employs lead in its 
compounds; these are further compounded as they unite 
with elements presented in solutions of sulphuric acid. 
Compounds of lead are preferred to those of any other 
metal because they are insoluble in an electrolytic bath.^ 

1 E. J. Wade, in an article in the Electrician, London, Vol. XXXIII, p. 603, 
says : " Herein lies the superiority of a lead-lead-peroxide cell to all others. If 
properly treated, it may be regenerated electrolytically, and so nearly to its 
original chemical and physical condition that it can be charged and recharged 
in this way hupdreds and even thousands of times before the total results of 
the slight changes that do take place depreciate it sufficiently to incapacitate it for 
further use, while with all other cells the changes that occur with each charging 
are relatively so large that although all possible means have been tried to reduce 
them to the minimum, they rapidly deteriorate, and require constant attention 
and repairs. The reason for the complete reversibility of the lead cell is 
entirely due to the chemical behaviour of certain of the compounds into which 
the metal enters. Lead alone, of all the metals, forms a sulphate that is 
practically insoluble and unacted upon by water and dilute sulphuric acid, and 
it also combines with oxygen to form a peroxide, having a good electrical con- 
ductivity, and equally unaffected by the liquid. When, therefore, a lead-lead- 
peroxide couple is discharged in dilute sulphuric acid, the lead sulphate, which 
is the ultimate product formed at the poles,, does not dissolve in the solution, 
but remains on the surface of the plates, ready for reduction and reoxidation 
when the current is reversed. Any local action that goes on when the cell is 
not at work also results in this insoluble sulphate, which tends to form a pro- 
tective coating on the metal, and thus reduces losses from this cause to a 
minimum. The compounds formed, when other metal than lead is used as 
the negative, not necessarily in a sulphuric-acid electrolyte, but in any other 
practically possible solution, are all soluble, and dissolve in the liquid as fast 
as they are formed, and this simple fact has, up to the present, barred the way 
to any substantial progress with these classes of reversible cells." 



146 



ELECTRIC BATTERIES 



As a storage cell is charged and discharged it offers baffling 
problems of chemical reduction and combination. Experi- 
ment here has outdistanced analysis, and even the best ap- 
paratus leaves much to be desired. The formation of lead 
sulphate yields little energy in comparison with the com- 




FiG. 49. 
Positive and negative plates, Electric Storage Battery C^., Philadelphia. 

binations into which zinc, iron, or copper freely enter. The 
active lead material needs a grid or support of inactive 
structure, which may be several times its own weight. 
And further, the formation of sulphate screens the inner 
portion of a plate from effective work. Thus the really 
useful part of an electrode may be no more than from 
5 to 15 per cent, of its total weight.^ 

The batteries of the Electric Storage Battery Company of 
Philadelphia have won wide favour ; they derive an advan- 
tage from a detail of form. The lead for the positive plate 
is curled up into small spirals resembling shavings as they 
leave a carpenter's plane. At the outset of operations 



1 London Electrician, Vol. XXXIII, p. 605. 



IN TRANSPORTATION 147 

they are fastened into sockets where they rest securely ; as 
they grow bigger in chemical combination there is ample 
room for them (Fig. 49). In earlier batteries there was a 
good deal of trouble as the lead left its net or grid in the 
successive alterations of its bulk. It is claimed that the 
positive plates in this battery survive alternate charging 
and discharging for 40,000 hours before they are destroyed, 
and that the life of the negative plates is thrice as long.-^ 

For the empire of electricity an effective storage battery 
means the dawn of a new day. A dynamo sends it cur- 
rents derived from wind- or water- 
powers, or from engines temporarily a Reservoir and an 

laden below their capacity, and these Equaliser, 

currents effect chemical restorations 
somewhat similar to those of electroplating. Then, at 
need, the storage battery yields electricity much as a vol- 
taic battery does. Let us make no mistake as to what is 
accumulated in a storage battery ; it is not electricity, but 
a metal, or a metallic compound which generates electricity 
on request. When a householder fills his coal-bin he is 
not storing fire, but a fuel which will give him fire when- 
ever he wishes. 

In the propulsion of launches and yachts, carriages and 
wagons, the storage battery has a field that grows wider 
every day. A ton of coal can be carried from Scranton to 
New York, 150 miles, for less than the cost of haulage one 
mile through the streets of the city. Not only is horse- 
power more expensive than that of steam in a huge loco- 
motive, but .a Mogul engine, as it takes 1000 tons of coal 
to market, is in charge of but two men ; it requires the same 
number of men to deliver a single wagon-load of coal to a 
customer in New York. Moreover, as cities grow in size, 

1 The Storage Battery, by Augustus Treadwell, Jr., New York, Macmillan 
Company, 1898, is a capital treatise describing storage batteries of various 
types in detail. 



148 ELECTRIC BATTERIES 

the average dwelling, store, or factory recedes farther and 
farther from the railroad station, or the steamboat landing, 
with a steadily increasing tax for haulage. 

Hence the clear promise of success as the electrical en- 
gineer begins to displace the city horse with the electromo- 
bile wagon and cab. In this field his battery is distinctly 
superior to oil or compressed-air motors. It is safe, as it 
contains nothing inflammable or liable to explode ; it is 
easily handled and controlled ; it does not offend by heat, 
vibration, or odour. An electromobile cab in New York 
has usually 44 cells, each of 9 plates, the whole weigh- 
ing 900 pounds, and equal to exerting the tractive force of 
three horses for four to five hours. Such cabs take up 
much less space than their predecessors in a crowded thor- 
oughfare, while the pavements are rescued from filth, dust, 
and noise. Freight-wagons have a heavier battery, pro- 
portioned to the load to be carried and the distance to be 
run. It is found that wooden wheels and solid rubber 
tires form the best equipment for both cabs and wagons. 
As electric vehicles are multiplied they are likely to put a 
new premium on good roads, as the bicycle has done ; in- 
deed, the outcome of the situation may be to make smooth 
and easy for the horse the path upon which his rivals have 
so boldly entered — rivals much less tolerant than he of 
quagmires and mud. 

The storage battery has other uses in transportation. 
While a ferry-boat lies at its dock, if its engine is busy 
storing electric fuel, the power there accumulated helps to 
propel the boat on its next trip. If half the working-day 
is spent at docks, the engine need be but half as powerful 
as when unassisted by the battery. On board a railroad 
train a dynamo rotated by the axle of a car may yield a 
current for a hundred lamps ; before the train comes to full 
speed, and while it pauses here and there, a small storage 
battery serves as the source of illumination. It is, how- 



AS EQUALISERS OF POWER 149 

ever, in acting like a gigantic fly-wheel that the storage 
battery has its chief importance. To begin with a minor 
case : In large office buildings and departmental stores 
the elevator service requires a great deal of power, with 
sharp alternations of much and little demand. At one 
moment eight elevators may be in transit, the next moment 
but two are busy, and so on. At every period, however 
short, of uncommon activity, the storage battery comes in 
to aid the dynamo current, which by itself would be inad- 
equate. Whenever the dynamo current is underworked its 
surplus energy goes into the battery to restore its lead. 

Now for fluctuations on a scale nothing short of stupen- 
dous : At power-stations in cities the variations of demand 
are both abrupt and wide. On traction lines there are 
" rush " hours at the beginning and close of the working- 
day, when the traffic is doubled or. trebled ; in lighting 
plants thqre is a sharp call for current about sunset. En- 
gines and generators had formerly to be powerful enough 
to meet the uttermost strain that might thus be put upon 
them, although but for three or four hours of the twenty- 
four. With the storage battery to supplement the engines 
these may be much smaller, because worked uniformly at 
their most economical pace, which is usually their maximum 
capacity or a little less. During hours of comparatively 
scant business the power is turned in part into the storage 
battery, whence it is released at the call of the heaviest 
travel or Hghting — to " take off the peak," as the engineers 
say. For such service as this batteries of monster propor- 
tions, costing $750,000 or more, are now yoked to the 
transportation and lighting systems of New York, Chicago, 
and other great cities. 

In the case of water-powers, which run day and night, 
there is similar profit whether they are used for traction 
and lighting, or in manufacturing. A mill usually requires 
power for but ten hours out of the twenty-four; for the 



1^0 ELECTRIC BATTERIES 

rest of the time the electric energy may be diverted to a 
storage battery so as to cut down the outlay for plant by 
nearly one-half. As the electrical engineer looks about 
him for business during the dull hours of the working-day, 
he espies with satisfaction the constantly increasing num- 
ber of batteries to be restored for use in cabs, wagons, 
launches, and yachts. He endeavours also to solve prob- 
lems in taxation, much as if he were a statesman desirous 
to stimulate a national industry. He lowers his tariff for 
the hours of slack demand ; he does the same when electri- 
city is used for heating purposes ; and he gives a discount 
proportioned to the amount of current a customer buys. 
In all this his reliance is largely upon a huge storage plant 
which may have an efficiency of as much as 84 per cent. 
At first the dynamo threatened to oust the battery of Volta 
from all but petty uses, but lo ! its cells are now taken from 
the shelf, made reversible, and promoted to a full partner- 
ship. In all this remarkable development fire and electri- 
city join hands for work and for economy, which neither 
can accomplish alone. In the storage battery the steam- 
engine finds its complement; when both are in harness for 
a common task they do their work with an efficiency un- 
exampled in engineering art. 

In the world of finance a significant union of traction, 
lighting, and power-transmission systems is afoot. This 
movement finds profit in substituting a large scale of oper- 
ations for a small one ; it finds an opportunity, also, to make 
a slack demand for one service coincide with a lively de- 
mand for another. The " rush " hours of the early morning 
on transportation lines are a time of scant electric lighting, 
so that then the combination of a trolley with a lighting 
system is a distinct advantage. Between five and seven 
o'clock at night, especially in winter, the case is different, 
for now the requirements for both lighting and traffic are 
at their height. Here enters the equalisation of pressure 



FIRE EXCELLED 151 

by a gigantic storage battery, proving itself the most lucra 
tive feature of the new installations. All this is not with- 
out precedent. In the water-supply of a great city a group 
of engines is kept busy day and night pumping an unvary- 
ing stream. Because the water flows into one reservoir 
instead of into several there follows an economy of power, 
and a trustworthiness of supply, which the electrical en- 
gineer has done no more than copy. 

Thus in the field of chemical solution, long so humble 
and subordinate, has electricity proved itself a multipher 
of human resources quite as fertile as in 
provinces of higher dignity, of earlier The chief of the Corner, 
exploitation. It gives metals a new 
plasticity without hammer-stroke or flame, and duplicates 
an intaglio or an etching with a delicacy denied to either tool 
or fire. It reproduces a statue as easily as a button, while 
it enables an artist by a flameless method to dupHcate his 
fragile model of wax or clay in enduring bronze. Follow- 
ing all metals to their beds of ore, it enters into rivalry with 
the blaze which but yesterday was the one agent of divid- 
ing metal from matrix, or refining crude masses of copper 
and silver to purity. Although for its storehouses of 
energy it uses metals costly as compared with coal, yet so 
economically are these employed that the storage battery 
is not only a convenient magazine of power for vehicles, — 
where heat is inadmissible or objectionable, — but plays an 
important part in equalising the vast fluctuations incident to 
lighting a metropolis and transporting its multitudes. 
There was somewhat of truth in the old supposition that 
electricity is a fluid; whatever its real nature may prove to 
be, this much is certain : a current flows into a reservoir and 
out again with a fluidity little short of perfection. 

The storage battery, for all the worth it has in itself, 
may develop still more as it points to the construction of 
molecules more intricate than its own. All that the chem- 



152 ELECTRIC BATTERIES 

ist has ever done in breaking up or building compounds in 
liquid form is extended and heightened as his solutions feel 
the throb of electricity. We learn how an old castle or 
bridge was put together when we see it demolished under 
the strokes of pick and crowbar. The dismantler saves 
himself needless toil when he follows the Hues of the archi- 
tect as closely as he can. More than one leader in chemistry 
appHes all this to the enigmas .of composition, and regards 
it as only decomposition in reverse. Let these men but 
follow up the clues already in their hands, let them unrid- 
dle the labyrinth of chemical bonds and ties, and there 
may succeed the creation at will of new artificial com- 
pounds of the first importance. The impulse to art given 
by Volta from his little town of Como may not fully spend 
itself till this be done. When heat makes its appearance 
as either a uniter or a separator it often works disturbances 
greatly to the prejudice of its success; when electricity is 
the agent this may not be the case. And thus there opens 
to the chemist another breadth of victories where electricity 
may either do better what heat does, now, or carry the flag 
into territory where fire may not enter at all. 



CHAPTER XII 

ELECTRICITY IN THE SERVICE OF THE MECHANIC AND 

ENGINEER 

TO the mechanic and engineer the principal use of fire 
is in the production of motive power through a steam- 
or a gas-engine. In a considerable and increasing measure 
he derives such motive power directly 

from watercourses hitherto little drawn Electricity Preferable 
,, 1-j Ai.i.1-- -i. to Other Modes of 

upon or totally neglected. At this point, Motion, 

therefore, we enter a field where electri- 
city Is not in contrast with fire, but creates economies and 
produces effects quite distinct from those possible to. fire — 
immensely extending Qvery mechanical resource and facility 
of pre-electric times. As we proceed we shall plainly see 
why it is that the engineer and the mechanic prefer electri- 
city to any other form of energy, and in a constantly increas- 
ing number and variety of cases begin work by converting 
all their motive power Into electric currents. 

It was Volta, as a chemist, who, devising his cell, first 
emancipated the electric current for new and unnumbered 
uses. His successor to-day is the en- 
gineer, who wins his spurs by bringing AsaMeans of Trans- 

hls generator to practical perfection, by mitting Motion, 
improving his steam- and gas-engines to 
double their efficiency of thirty years ago, or by designing 
water-wheels of the utmost economy. If to the engineer 
and mechanic the electric art owes much, magnificently 

153 



154 ELECTRIC MACHINERY 

has the debt been repaid. Of this an illustration displays 
itself in every street. An old-fashioned bell-pull has a 
wire which moves as a whole ; an electric bell has a wire 
which as a whole remains at rest while it transmits a cur- 
rent from its push-button ; thus does electricity convey 
motion without movement of its conductor as a mass. 
Availing himself of this golden property, the machinist re- 
moves from his shop a labyrinth of wheels and belts, and 
puts in their place a few wires at rest, each in charge of 
the motor actuating a machine. Manifold gains result. 
The power needed to drive these wheels and belts is saved, 
and when but one or two machines of a large number are 
to be set in motion, the economy rises to a high figure, 
while the workshop becomes lighter, cleaner, safer, more 
wholesome in every way. Since electricity is of all phases 
of energy the easiest to preserve from losses resembling 
leakage or friction, the current can not only be distributed 
throughout the largest workshop with convenience and 
economy, but it can be sent to the shop from an engine or a 
water-wheel many miles away, as in connecting motors at 
Buffalo to dynamos at Niagara, twenty-four miles distant. 

With the conveyance of electricity for distances vastly 
exceeding twenty-four miles we have long been familiar in 
the telegraph. The long-distance transmission of mere 
signals has been followed by that of gigantic powers as a re- 
sult of advances along several diverse lines of invention : first 
and chiefly, through perfecting the dynamo which converts 
mechanical motion into cheap electricity, and the introduc- 
tion of the motor, which, little else than the dynamo re- 
versed, economically recovers motion from electricity; 
second, by taking advantage of the fact that the higher 
the voltage, or pressure, of a current, the less wire does it 
ask for its transmission. In this particular a stream of 
electricity resembles a pencil of light. If parallel luminous 
rays are intensified by lenses, their path is narrowed as 



TRANSMISSION AFAR 155 

they move through space. A current of 1000 volts re- 
quires but one-hundredth as much copper to carry it as a 
current of 100 volts. The copper required for a given 
distance in transmission varies inversely as the square of 
the electrical pressure. 

Of course the higher the voltage the greater are the 
possibilities of mischief, and the more costly the coverings 
demanded for insulation ; yet, allowing for every abatement 
on this score, electricity has marked advantages over any 
other mode of conveying power afar. Until within recent 
years such conveyance was commonly effected, as in some 
of the traction lines of cities, by a swiftly moving cable of 
steel. Surely, it >vas supposed, nothing feasible could be 
more efificient. But mark the superiority of electrical 
transmission. The current from Niagara has a pressure of 
1 1,000 volts. Were equal energy sent forward as mechan- 
ical motion it would rend apart steel cables eight times as 
large as the copper conductors employed. And this with- 
out considering the vast difference between the moderate 
resistance offered by the copper, motionless as a mass, and 
the considerable resistance of steel cables advancing and 
bending round their pulleys at the rate of ten miles an 
hour, let us say. 

During the summer of 1891 a memorable experiment was 
carried out in Germany between Lauffen and Frankfort, 1 12 
miles apart. A turbine of 180 horse-power was used to 
generate a current of 25,000 volts, which was transmitted 
with a loss of but one-fourth. Although no equal distance 
has yet been covered by a commercial line, a higher volt- 
age is maintained on the wire which connects Telluride, 
Colorado, with the Gold King Mine, two and a quarter 
miles away. By employing glass insulators 5 inches high 
and 5j inches broad, a current is conveyed at 40,000 
volts. Once, at a time of bad weather, the pressure was 
raised to 50,000 volts; through a fall of damp snow or rain 



156 ELECTRIC MACHINERY 

the wires became plainly visible at night, and the character- 
istic hissing of high-tension currents could be heard sev- 
eral hundred feet away. 

How far electric energy may be borne with profit is a 
question of local circumstances. Where fuel is scarce and 
dear, where roads are steep and all but impassable, the Hne 
may be lengthened, especially when a waterfall may be laid 
under tribute with but little outlay. In mining it was usual 
until recently to transport the ore as raised from the shaft 
to the crushing-mill, which might be miles away. With 
electricity the transmission of power takes the place of the 
freightage of ore ; the crushing-mill is brought to the mine 
and the cost of handling and haulage is reduced to the 
minimum. In the vast region of the Southwest, of which 
Arizona stands the centre, huge central stations are be- 
ing erected to supply light and power in districts where 
wood and coal are scarce or absent, and where all that fertile 
soil needs is the irrigation that no other agent but electri- 
city can provide. As one improvement in electrical prac- 
tice succeeds another, as the scale of operations grows 
bolder, and the rate of interest on sound investments tends 
to fall, the distances over which currents are borne ap- 
proaches that of the Lauffen-Frankfort experiment. At 
Los Angeles, California, a current is received from the 
Santa Ana River, above Redlands, eighty-one miles distant, 
at a pressure of 33,000 volts. 

In long-distance transmission it is most desirable that a 

current should have the highest practicable voltage, but for 

safety's sake, and to be available in or- 

The Transformer, diuary lamps and motors, it is necessary 
that the voltage should be reduced — at 
times to as little as the hundredth part. The appliance 
which effects this *' stepping down " is the transformer. Its 
work is much the same as that of the wheels which famil- 
iarly reduce the motion of the minute-hand of a clock to 



INTENSITY VARIED 157 

the slow rotation of the hour-hand ; but instead of the rigid 
push of a small wheel against a large one, the ethereal in- 
fluence called induction is impressed into service. Induc- 
tion in its most familiar phase is illustrated when a magnet 
and a bit of soft iron approach each other. As the soft 
iron comes into the field of the m.agnet, it becomes itself a 
magnet, and at the distance of y-^o of an inch its attractive 
power is almost as great as when the steel and it are joined 
together. In the same way, as we have already seen, if 
we have two parallel wires near each other, and send a 
current through one of them, a current for an instant will 
be induced in the other (Fig. 34). And for all that we are 
now observing the action of ether instead of that of palpable 
and visible masses, the phenomena of induction have a 
striking similarity to those of wheels in contact. 

If we wish to vary the speed of a motion as it is received 
by one wheel from another, we apply the circumference 
of one wheel to the axle of another, as in a clock or a 
watch. When the medium is electrical 
instead of mechanical (Fig. 50), a cur- 
rent sent through a thick wire induces 
in a coil of thin wire a current as much 
more intense than itself as there are 
more turns of wire in A than in B. Con- ^^'^' 5°- 

, • • /J • J ' T) 1 i. • Ruhmkorff coil, 

tranwise, A mduces m B an electric 

throb less energetic than that borne by itself in the same 
proportion reversed. The first of these two actions has long 
been displayed in this Ruhmkorff coil, an instrument built up 
of two closely wound coils, one of fine wire, the other of wire 
comparatively coarse, the second coil surrounding the first. 
When a frequently interrupted current is sent through the 
thick wire it excites in the outer coil pulses so extreme in 
tension as to create sparks eight inches or more in length. 
Copying this design, a transformer may be built to ** step 
up," that is, to take in a current at low pressure and convert 




158 ELECTRIC MACHINERY 

it to an intensity which may be a hundred times as great 
In "stepping down" the action is reversed: the received 
current enters the coil of thin wire, and in its neighbour 
excites pulses of much reduced tension. In its largest and 
best designs this device has an efficiency of 90 per cent, 
and more. Its wastes appear in the form of heat, and at 
Niagara are turned to account in winter for the purpose 
of warming the house in which the huge transformers are 
placed. 

In a workshop a current is superior to every other prime 
mover. A thousand feet of belting one inch wide must 

pass round a pulley in a minute to trans- 
Motor and Machine Hiit a siugle horsc-power. An electric 
United. motor without belt or gearing becomes 

one with the wheel of a sewing-machine, 
a burnisher, or a pump, and there, as elsewhere, expense 
ceases the moment the current is switched off (Fig. 51). 
The adjustment and control of a lathe is particularly simpli- 
fied by this new mode of actuation. A flexible lamp-cord 
can bring in its power, and the heavy machine, Hke many 
another, is started, stopped, reversed, or varied in spped 
by a touch upon a regulating handle. The versatility of 
the electric motor is as well attested in a coal-mine as in a 
workshop. First of all, a machine undercuts a bituminous 
seam with twenty times the effect of a pick and shovel ; 
the coal is thrown into a wagon and a second. motor hauls 
it away ; from the bottom of the shaft another motor lifts 
the load to daylight, while a fourth is busy maintaining a 
current of fresh air. 

In an iron-mine, wherever the rock is hard, the best drill 
is still driven by compressed air, which is an aid to ventila- 
tion and coolness, but for every other service electricity is 
in commission. All the way from the ore-bed to its issue 
as pig-iron, or steel billets or rails, the metal at almost 
every turn is manipulated by electricity. Where vast 



MUSCLES SUPPLANTED 159 

power is in constant demand for rolling rails and other 
heavy work, a monster steam-engine of the best type is 
in harness. To-day a twin engine driving a giant dynamo 
performs every other duty, displacing the many small en- 
gines which were formerly in charge of cranes, elevators, 
tilting-ladles, and the like, each of which is now driven by 
an electric motor, with remarkable economy. At the 
works of the Carnegie Steel Company at Homestead, 
Pennsylvania, the ores, fuel, and fluxes, as received from 
the mines, are unloaded, transported to the furnaces, hoisted, 
and discharged by a round of electric motors ; while a suc- 
cession of ladles, trucks, cranes, shapers, and saws, all actu- 
ated by electricity, complete the manufacture of the steel 
into beams. These are electrically laden upon railroad cars 
within twelve hours after the raw material is rolled into the 
yard. From first to last there is no direct touch by a human 
hand ; the staff of the company confine their attention to 
giving effect to fingers of more than human grasp, strength, 
and endurance. 

In the production of American pig-iron the cost of labour 
per ton fell about one-half in the ten years ending with 
1897. A considerable part of that saving was due to the 
new electrical muscles which carry the burdens of an iron- 
mill almost as if weight were for the nonce aboHshed. 

In ship-building not less than in metallurgy the electric 
motor is displacing the steam-engine. At Newport News, 
Virginia, the largest revolving derrick in the world is busy 
in a shipyard; it handles 150 tons for a diameter of 147 
feet, and 70 tons for a diameter of 207 feet. Steamships 
and war-vessels offer a field in which the electric motor can 
abolish much waste, discomfort, and liability to damage. 
A large modern steamship contains, besides her main en- 
gines, 40 to 50 auxiliary engines, wasteful in their use of 
steam, and served by miles of piping, and hundreds of 
valves whose heat and leakages cause extreme discomfort 



i6o ELECTRIC MACHINERY 

and do much harm. These minor engines are attached to 
the anchor, the steering-gear, the boat-cranes, the deck- 
winches, the ice-machines, the ventilating-fans, ash-hoists, 
and the pumps ; they work the dynamos which yield elec- 
tric light. The Darmstadt and the Prinz Heinrich of the 
North German Lloyd Steamship Company are now 
equipped with electrically operated deck-winches instead 
of the famihar noisy donkey-engines. The later steamer 
Bremen^ of the same line, is fitted with sixteen electric deck- 
cranes for handling cargo ; they are noiseless in operation, 
and so simple that any stevedore can manage them with 
ease. Some of the new American battle-ships now build- 
ing will have their turrets turned and their large guns 
loaded, served with ammunition, and trained by electricity.^ 
What the marine engineer is beginning to do has already 
been done in some of the largest mining and metal-work- 
ing establishments in the world. Elec- 
Great Engines Drive ^Hcity has made it profitable to unify 
out Small. motive power at a monster generating 

plant, since it provides a simple and in- 
stant means of distributing that power, not through the 
contracted dimensions of a ship, but over acres or even 
square miles. Power is much more cheaply produced in 
one big engine than in several small ones; motors do not 
need the constant attention demanded by steam-engines 
— the packing of piston-rods and valve-stems, the unremit- 
ting and costly lubrication. An engineer in front of a 
switchboard has ten times the directive control that he 
had before electricity gave his fingers a reach of miles, and 
conferred upon him the same mastery as the sweep of 
immediate vision. 

All this is repeated and extended in the field of ordinary 
manufactures. A single huge engine has its power con- 

1 " Electricity in Marine Work," S. Dana Greene, Gassier' s Magazine^ 
July, 1899. 



LARGE ENGINES VERSUS SMALL 161 

verted into electricity by a dynamo, and the current car- 
ried throughout vast premises not only actuates the 
machinery, but supplies light, and such heat as may be 
needed, in making hats, for example. A like economy 
binds one small factory to another, and aboHshes their local 
motive powers. Small steam-engines are very wasteful of 
fuel, and often require in proportion to power five times as 
much coal as the giants of the central stations. With these 
giants, therefore, is the victory. Note a report of their 
battle as it comes from a steam-boiler inspector of Phila- 
delphia. He says that at the end of 1898 625 boilers out 
of a total of 3575 had been displaced by electric motors in 
that city. Wherever power is needed intermittently, or in 
small units, the electric motor has the field. An engine 
must have steam up all day, whether it is busy or idle ; a 
motor goes off the pay-Hst the moment it stops work. 

The Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York 
had in November, 1899, ^s part of its output, about 30,000 
horse-power in electric motors ; many of these displaced 
steam- or gas-engines. 

In many cases a large electrical installation originally es- 
tabhshed mainly to furnish Hght, has found added profit 
in providing motive power during the 
hours when little or no Hght is in de- ^ Lighting service 

'^ ^ _ Cheapens Motive 

mand. At Montreal the Dominion Power. 

Cotton Mills buy from the Royal Elec- 
tric Company 3000 horse-power for the actuation of ma- 
chinery, with the right to use the current until 7 P. M. in 
summer, and until 4 P. M. in winter. The mills are thus 
able to obtain power cheaper than from steam, while 
the electrical works can use their machinery, lines, and 
other equipment by day as well as by night. 

The locomotive divides with the stationary engine the 
honours of fire as a source of motive power. So also with 
electricity : all its triumphs in the empire of manufacture 



i62 ELECTRIC MACHINERY 

are repeated in the realm of transportation. The first elec- 
trical railroad, 500 metres in length, was built for the 

Berlin Exhibition of 1879 by Siemens & 

Electric Halske. Several other experimental lines 

Transportation. followed, and in February, 1888, that of 

the Union Passenger Railway Company 
of Richmond, Virginia, proved itself the first important en- 
terprise of the kind in America.^ In its present form the con- 
struction of a street-car motor is a marvel of compactness 
and efficiency ; its revolving armature (Fig. 52) has a core of 
laminated iron to avoid the waste of current suffered in the 
rings originally devised by Pacinotti and Gramme (Fig. 36). ^ 
Although the competition of electricity with the horse in 
this wide field is of so recent date, it is already near to 
complete victory— in America, at least. Only on short 
lines, and in a few small towns and villap-es, does the car- 
horse retain the foothold that once seemed so secure. In 
1898, New York, following the lead of Budapest and 
Washington, adopted on a large scale the open-conduit 
system, which, in the circumstances of a huge traffic com- 
pressed within narrow limits, is much safer and better than 
an overhead-trolley line. At Chicago, the line to Engle- 
wood uses storage batteries for propulsion. 

Substantial reasons why electric traction of various types 
has made its way so fast are not far to seek. It is quicker 
than equine locomotion ; the space occupied by horses is set 
free; their filth is banished; the injury to pavements from 
their iron-shod hoofs is done away with. It is the cheapest 
of all services, equine or other. A surface line in a popu- 
lous city is best supplemented, as in Boston, by a subway, 

1 A brief historical sketch appears as Chapter XII in The Electric Railway 
in Theory and Practice, by Oscar T. Crosby and Louis Bell. New York, 
W. J. Johnston Company. 

2 A detailed explanation of the motor of a street-car, fully illustrated, is 
given in Chapter IV of Electric Street Railways, by Edwin J. Houston and 
A. E. Kennelly. New York, W. J. Johnston Company. 




Fig. 51. 

Worthington triplex pump, geared to 60 horse-power, 2080 volt induction 

motor. General Electric Co., Schenectady, N. Y. 




Fig. 52. 

Armature for 5 horse-power direct-current motor. 

General Electric Co., Schenectady, N. Y. 



TRANSPORTATION 163 

or a tunnel, where there is no interruption by other traffic, 
and a speed is attainable quite out of the question above 
ground. Here, too, electricity is the best motive power. 
In London, the City and South London line, which runs 
beneath the Thames from Waterloo Station, has a sug- 
gestive advantage in its contour. As a train begins its 
journey the dip of the road gives it precisely the accel- 
eration required; as the terminus is approached the train 
receives an equally desirable check as it climbs uphill. 
This contour may be usefully reproduced in the succes- 
sive lengths of an underground road as it unites station to 
station, a benefit denied to an elevated line, which, perforce, 
must be level throughout. The new Central London 
underground route which connects Liverpool Street and 
Shepherd's Bush, six miles apart, is operated by electricity ; 
its line is contoured as a series of gentle curves. Travellers 
who remember the soot and fumes of the original under- 
ground tunnel of London will rejoice that electrical pro- 
pulsion has now been adopted for its lines. 

Electric traction is a boon in the thronged streets of a 
metropolis ; it works yet greater benefit when it traverses 
a city's gates and passes out into the suburbs. Having a 
pace double that of horses, it quadruples the area available 
for homes. In the older American cities the more central, 
narrow streets of residences are fast emptying themselves 
into districts where cheap land, modern architecture, and 
fresh air unite their persuasions. Between Albany and 
Troy, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Buffalo and Niagara Falls, 
the electric roads compete vigorously with the steam lines. 
Their cars run more frequently, they may be boarded any- 
where through miles of streets, and they leave a passenger 
much nearer his destination than if he were landed at a 
railroad terminus. The consequence is that from each of 
these cities there stretches to its twin, avenue after avenue 
of dwellings surrounded by much of the comfort and whole- 



164 ELECTRIC MACHINERY 

someness of country life. Cleveland, Ohio, as the centre 
of a populous vicinage, and of rare commercial enterprise, 
can boast of the most remarkable network of electric lines 
in the world, amounting, in October, 1899, to no less than 
434 miles, with Pittsburg, 150 miles off, as an objective 
point in the near future. 

That the electric dynamo may act as a motor, and vice 
versa, has been noticed in Chapter VIIL On the Jungfrau 
Railway in Switzerland this is ingeniously turned to account. 
When the cars run downhill their wheels are made to gen- 
erate a current, the motors serving as dynamos ; this cur- 
rent takes its way into the line-wire for storage at head- 
quarters. 

One of the creations of the suburban trolley line is the 
excursion travel which pours out of American cities in 
all seasons, but especially, of course, during the height of 
summer. Every day, simply for the sake of the breeze 
caused by the motion of the car itself, a host of families 
leave the sun-baked streets for an hour's run in pure air. 
For longer excursions, affording visits to scenery of un- 
common beauty or historic interest, there is ample oppor- 
tunity in New England. " Its street-railways form the 
largest connected system in the world, running from Nashua, 
New Hampshire, on the north, through Boston to Newport 
and Providence, Rhode Island, on the south, a distance of 
130 miles. Eastward they extend to the tip of Cape Ann, 
some 45 miles, and westward to West Warren, Massachu- 
setts, some 80 miles." -^ Such a series of lines would lend 
itself to a charming variety of tours. All that is necessary 
is co-operation, so that through cars may be run of a thor- 
oughly comfortable kind, and without loss of time as a pas- 
senger crosses the boundary of a particular road. It may 
be that for such a development as this the consolidations 
long ago effected in steam lines may be needful. 

1 R. H. Derrah, Street Railway Journal, New York, July, 1899. 




r2 'A 



ALLIES OR RIVALS? 163 

While all this extension of electric traction has been 
pushed forward, the managers of steam lines have not been 
passive and uninterested spectators. The 
New York, New Haven and Hartford The Third-raii System. 
Railroad has inaugurated three elec- 
tric lines with marked success, combining the trolley and 
third-rail systems for a total distance of 49 miles. In the 
third-rail method two rails, as usual, bear the car-wheels, a 
third, laid between them, serves to convey the current to a 
sliding bar or shoe attached to each car. Mr. N. H. Heft, 
chief of the electrical department of this railroad, states 
(November 10, 1899): 

During the summer months the Nantasket Beach service is ex- 
tended on the main line to Braintree, alternating with the main-line 
electric service. This main-hne service,which is the heaviest we now 
operate, consists in replacing the steam-locomotives by standard 
coaches equipped with four 175-horse-power motors, and hauling 
the same trains, of from two to five coaches, without change of 
schedule. We have under consideration the construction of other 
lines, both third-rail and trolley, the third-rail giving the better 
results wherever it is possible to operate it. 

This third rail is easily and quickly laid. At one time 
all three rails on a section of the line were submerged by 
water, without interruption of the current. The third rail 
provides a conductor every whit as efficient as a large 
copper cable, and the escape of current from end to end of 
the line is but slight (Fig. 53). 

In the light of such a success as this the query is 
prompted, Will electricity displace the steam-locomotive.? 
The two sides of the ledger are easily 
compared. At a central station coals Rivalry and its Prob- 
of inferior quality may be burned, or ^^^^ outcome, 
water-power harnessed, at the very min- 
imum of cost. If high speed be wanted, the rotary motor 
can far outspin the reciprocating mechanism of steam. 
The pistons of the Empire State Express, between New 



i66 ELECTRIC MACHINERY 

York and Buffalo, change their direction eight times a sec- 
ond, involving a tremendous strain on the metal. The 
debit side of the account displays the cost of fencing the 
line so as to prevent accidents from powerful currents; 
and the fact that, with a supply of power centralised at 
a single point, any derangement or accident works much 
more injury than when the units are independent of each 
other as self-moving machines. Reviewing these facts, the 
consensus of competent judges is that in sparsely settled 
regions through which the average locomotive takes its 
way it will keep its place. In thickly populated districts, 
such as surround a metropolis and are found in Massachu- 
setts and Connecticut, it is likely that electricity will con- 
stantly strengthen its grasp. 

The question is one of finance not less than of engineering. 
This is a time when the promoter of combination is in the 
saddle ; we are likely very soon to see steam and electric 
interests lay down their arms and compose their differences. 
Each can supplement the other's deficiencies with profit to 
both. For short branches, where a locomotive would be 
absurdly underladen in hauling a car or two, an electric 
motor would come in as cheaper and better. On such lines 
the road-bed, bridges, and rolHng stock could be hghter 
and less expensive than those of a steam line, and econom- 
ically furnish a more frequent service. Where the trains 
are heavy and comparatively infrequent, the advantage 
remains with the old and ponderous steam-locomotive. 

While increased economy of railroad engineering and 

operation has brought a severe competition to bear upon 

the canals, it is altogether probable that 

Electric Traction ^^^ ^°^^ ^^ caual transportation will soon 

for Canals. Iqq rcduccd by the employment of the 

electric motor. It is expected that on 

the Erie Canal at least two hundred electric motors will be 

at work during 1900. 



LOWERED PRICES 167 

Electric art has an interesting side to any one who has 
ever built or paid for an experimental model and con- 
trasted its cost with that of a similar 
article manufactured at wholesale by ^ wider Market and 
machinery. As electrical engineering Lower Prices, 
has passed from the experimental to the 
commercial stage, and that a stage of huge proportions, its 
economies have rapidly passed from little to much. First 
of all, its units of power have been vastly increased in size. 
Successive improvements in design, material, and arrange- 
ment unite in an efficiency simply astonishing when the 
last state of electric mechanism is compared with the first. 
As a consequence, price-lists have been steadily scaled 
down, except, temporarily, in such a year as 1899, when 
the metal market displayed so uncommon an advance. 
As dynamos, motors, and other machinery have gained in 
popular acceptance they have become cheaper, with the 
effect of broadening their acceptance yet more. 

In 1884 ^ 50-kilowatt (67-horse-power) dynamo was con- 
sidered a large machine. The General Electric Company 
at Schenectady, New York, has constructed several gen- 
erators, each of 3500 kilowatts (4690 horse-power). These 
monsters have a three-phase revolving field with 40 poles, 
and run at a speed of 75 revolutions a minute, yielding a 
current of 6600 volts. In 1884 the price of dynamos was 
about 20 cents per watt (yie horse-power), while the 
price of the machine just mentioned is approximately but 
1.2 cents per watt. The cost of generating a kilowatt (i^ 
horse-power) of electric energy from steam appears to have 
been at least 7.5 cents per horse-power in 1884. At the 
end of 1899 the cost of delivering for an hour a kilowatt 
to large street-railway systems from steam is only one cent. 
and the power-house operating costs are reported in som.e 
cases as low as half a cent. Electric energy from large 
water-powers has concurrently fallen in price in much the 



i68 ELECTRIC MACHINERY 

same ratio. In 1882 the price of a sixteen-candle lamp 
was about a dollar; in seventeen years the price has 
fallen to 20 cents in lots of a thousand, with special dis- 
counts to large consumers. During the same interval the 
price of plain carbons a foot long and half an inch in 
diameter, for arc-lamps, has dropped from $60 to $8.50 
per thousand. The introduction of soft steel has been very- 
advantageous to the electric-railway motor, enabling its 
output to be increased from 5 watts per pound of net 
weight, in 1884, to 12 J watts in the gearless, and 18 J in 
the geared, motors of the largest size manufactured by 
the General Electric Company at the end of 1899. 

We have bestowed a glance upon electricity in its larger 

services to the engineer and mechanic as it impels the huge 

bulk of an express-train, or the mighty 

Evenness and Delicacy whccls of a Stecl-mill. Let US tum for a 
of Motion as Creators , ... ... . 

of Automatic Devices, momeut to the morc dclicatc qualities of 
the current which commend it to the 
mechanician as he constructs and directs tools and instru- 
ments of consummate ingenuity. The perfect steadiness 
of the electric motor makes it indispensable to the phono- 
graph, where the slightest jolting would make speech or 
music fall into a confused noise. Its flexibility is so ex- 
quisite that, revolving the surgeon's tiny saw, it equips him 
for operations of a new daring and refinement. 

The current has characteristics even more valuable which 
spring from its positive action, however minute its quan- 
tity. In the telegraph at work over long distances this 
comes clearly into view. In days of yore, when letters 
were intrusted to a chain of messengers, each of whom bore 
the pouch for a stage of its journey, a carrier might come 
to the end of his trip utterly fagged out, but if he had the 
strength to pass his budget to the next man it was enough. 
The relays of olden times are curiously imitated in the re- 
lays of the telegraph. A feeble pulse from a distance is 



ELECTRIC INITIATION 169 

just strong enough to lift the armature of an eleciromagnet, 
but in doing so it brings one wire in contact with another 
and sends a strong local current into a second electro- 
magnet, which may be as powerful as you please. Let us 
follow a telegram as it takes its way from Montreal to 
Vancouver — a distance of 2906 miles. First it goes to Fort 
William, at the head of Lake Superior, where the current, 
weak after its run of 998 miles, touches off instantly, through 
an automatic repeater, a second powerful current generated 
at Fort William. This, in turn, bears the despatch 937 
miles to Swift Current, through another self-acting repeater. 
In like manner a third repeater at Swift Current sends the 
message 971 miles, for its final stage to Vancouver. The 
repeater is identical in principle with the telegraphic relay 
described and illustrated in the next chapter; given a 
proper succession of repeaters and it would be easy to 
belt the earth with a single electric circuit. 

It is in pulling triggers in such fashion as thi^, in liber- 
ating and directing forces indefinitely greater than the 
initial impulse, that electricity confers upon muscles of 
brass and steel something very like a nervous system, so 
that the merest touch points the course of a steamship 
through the tempest-tossed Atlantic. Engineer, workman, 
and artist can thus reserve their strength for tasks more 
profitable than muscular dead lift, and find their sweep of 
initiation and control broadened to the utmost bound. In 
the field of war, for instance, a torpedo can be launched, 
propelled, steered, and exploded by a telegraph-key a mile 
or two away; the constructor may, indeed, confidently give 
all his orders in advance and build a torpedo which will 
fulfil a fate of both murder and suicide predetermined in 
its cams and magnets. 

In the service of war and peace one would suppose the 
ordinary telegraph to be speedy enough. Not so, thinks 
the inventor. In one of the methods due to Mr. P. B. 



lyo 



ELECTRIC MACHINERY 



Delany, a despatch wings its way from New York to Chi- 
cago at the rate of one thousand words a minute, to Phila- 
delphia thrice as fast. The telegram is first taken to a 
machine which perforates each letter in symbols on a strip 
of paper, then the strip is run between a row of metallic 
springs of exquisite delicacy (Fig. 64). At each perforation 
the springs touch, and a momentary current is shot through 
the wire. At the receiving-station the delay involved in 
the arousal and motion of electromagnets is abolished. 
The current instant by instant writes its message on a 
moving ribbon of paper sensitised so as to change colour 
under an electric flow. This instance is typical of what 
ingenuity can do when electricity is added to its armoury. 
A task is divided between an operator and an automatic 
machine in such wise that intelligence is allotted only that 
part for which intelligence is required, while for the re- 
maining part the utmost speed of electrical and chemical 
action is invoked — of a pace which, in this particular ex- 
ample, outstrips the most dexterous manipulation sixtyfold. 
A census tabulator invented by Mr. Herman Hollerith 
of Washington, and adopted by the Census Bureau, exalts 
by a noteworthy step the quality of electrical work following 
mechanical initiation of the simplest. Imagine a census card 
divided into say two hundred spaces. John Smith's status 
is registered on such a card by punching holes in the 
squares assigned to Male, White, Native of New York, 
Reads and Writes, Lawyer, Married, and so forth. When 
the card bears the whole of its story it is laid upon a machine 
and a lid is pressed down. In the machine are two hundred 
needles, each corresponding on the card to a space which 
may or may not be punched. Wherever a needle meets a 
perforation it passes through and completes an electric 
circuit; each circuit moves a specific wheel one tooth for- 
ward, the Lawyer wheel, the Married wheel, or some other. 
Accordingly, if the Lawyer wheel, let us suppose, had 



USES OF INST ANT ANEITY 171 

borne the number 277 before it passed upon John Smith's 
card, that card now advances it to 278, which figure by a 
simple attachment may be printed as desired. 

It was a great thought in numeration when the position 
of a figure became significant as well as the figure itself — 
when I began to mean 10, 100, or 1000 by a mere change 
of place. Mr. Hollerith's devices, in which position means 
so much, are now applied to railroad accounting and to the 
digestion of statistics. Their principle is that the particu- 
lar place of a perforation among hundreds or thousands of 
others registers the accession of any fact represented in 
the mechanism, or any figure, however large. Machinery 
similar in principle is now employed instead of a mechan- 
ical Jacquard in weaving, and also in the movements of an 
experimental type-writer which, if successful, would lead 
the way to reducing the muscular effort of keyboard ma- 
nipulations — now fast extending in the field of type- 
casting and kindred arts. 

All this and much other ingenious apparatus is created 
by electricity as an initiator of unrivalled delicacy ; many 
other devices as remarkable have been 
born from the virtual instantaneity of its instantaneity Made 
flight. Of this, of course, the supreme useful, 

example is telegraphy. An illustration 
remarkable enough is the mechanism by which a hundred 
or more clocks in a city keep time together, minute by 
minute, or second by second. Two pendulums may swing 
in perfect step, no matter how many miles apart, and dis- 
charge duties much less simple than showing the hour. 
They may actuate the pencil which reproduces a portrait, 
or which writes an autograph, or which traces the devious 
course of a steamship as she skirts a thousand miles of 
coast. Some of the most noteworthy mechanism of teleg- 
raphy and the long-distance transmission of power involves 
the exquisite synchronism which no other agent but elec- 



172 ELECTRIC MACHINERY 

tricity can provide. On the South Side Elevated Railroad 
of Chicago each car has a motor of its own ; any number 
of these cars may be joined as a train, since all the motors 
revolve with even step. 

A current has the speed of light ; it has also the ability 
of light to communicate impulses of broad range and great 
complexity. Ether bears to the eye luminous waves of 
widely various dimensions, each exciting the sensation of a 
particular hue all the way from red to violet. In the same 
fashion electric waves of most diverse contour may be com- 
mitted to a wire in the full confidence that they will arrive 
at their destination without the slightest jostling or confu- 
sion. Proceeding upon this fact. Professor Elisha Gray de- 
vised his harmonic telegraph, perhaps with an inspiration 
due less to the phenomena of light than to those of music. 
If a tuning-fork be struck and held over the wires of a 
piano it will arouse to sympathetic vibration the wire which 
utters its own note, but none other. Each of the several 
messages in the harmonic system is sent into the telegraph 
line by a special tuning-fork, vibrated by an electro- 
magnet. The composite tone, formed of the whole round 
of messages, as.it arrives at the receiving-station, is resolved 
into its component tones by an array of harmonic plates, 
each attuned to one of the notes sent into the line. An in- 
genious device thereupon converts the signals into the or- 
dinary Morse characters. When we come to consider the 
Marconi wireless telegraph we shall see how much it would 
be improved by the adoption of a harmonic method like 
this for its signals. 

The electric clock at which we were looking a little while 
ago can, if we please, be sealed in a glazed box, secure 
from dust and dampness. It is seclusion hke this which 
keeps electric motors free from the dirt and slush beneath 
a street-car, or preserves them aboard ship from attack by 
salt-laden air. Here opens a fresh path to the inventor 



TOOL AND MOTOR UNITED 173 

who wishes to avoid the resistance or leakage entailed when 
a rod moves through a slot or a stuffing-box. It is often 
of cardinal importance that a bit of metal 
at rest should throb with a pulse strong ^ ^^^ seclusion 
enough to do severe drudgery, or tell a »« Feasible, 

tale which otherwise would go untold. 
If an engineer wishes to know how much heat wastes 
itself through the walls of a steam-cylinder, his question is 
answered through a motionless wire attached to a delicate 
thermometer buried in the cylinder's mass. The same 
method informs the chemist experimenting with new alloys 
of changes often abrupt and fleeting, and at times denot- 
ing qualities he seeks to detain or reproduce. 

As we prove when we unhook a telephone or lift an 
incandescent lamp, electricity readily traverses a flexible 
wire ; this unbars a fresh gate to inge- 
nuity. To-day rock-drills, coal-cutters, a New Flexibility: 
and deck-planers are designed in forms Ether Replacing wires, 
that combine motor and tool, actuated 
through wires as flexible as twine ; so much is thereby 
gained in adaptability that much light machinery, rigidly 
limited in play by shafts, belts, or gearing, is being remod- 
elled for use with electric power. Drilling-, slotting-, and 
milling-machines are now built in portable forms ; they are 
brought to bear on large and heavy castings with an ease 
and convenience new in the machine-shop. Dentistry and 
other arts of refined manipulation are indebted for novel 
facilities to the flexible mechanical shaft — a tightly wound 
coil of steel wire. This contrivance is being shown to the 
door by the new partnership between an electric thread 
and a tool. Even the thread, however slender, which binds 
a reservoir of power to its work, can, on occasion, be dis- 
carded, as in the rolling contact of a trolley-wheel; and 
contact itself may be dispensed with if strict economy is 
not imperative, as we shall see by and by when we come 



174 ELECTRIC MACHINERY 

to look at the Preece and Marconi plans of telegraphy 
without connecting wires. 

Electricity, light, heat, and chemical action are all, in 
essence, motion ; electricity is the most desirable of them 
all, because it can most readily and 
The Echo of fully bccomc the source of any other. 

Intelligence. file prc-cmincnt sensitiveness of electri- 
cal devices makes them a surpassing 
means of measuring minute portions of space or time, or 
of energy in its most elusive phases. Hence a brood of 
telltales of widely diversified purpose. Selenium, a 
metalloid of the same lineage as sulphur, and betraying its 
descent by a striking family resemblance, transmits electri- 
city much more freely in light than in darkness. A stick 
of selenium, therefore, is the heart of a contrivance to give 
warning when extinction befalls a lamp charged with im- 
portant duty, or to register the fluctuations of natural or 
artificial light. 

In thermometers a circuit broken or completed acts as 
a fire-signal, or, on shipboard, heralds the approach of an 
iceberg. Electric fingers sound a gong when the water 
recedes below the safety limit in a steam-boiler, or report 
an attempted breach of bolt or bar by the burglar's jimmy. 
Each of these warnings can be registered at a distance, so 
that in case of neglect to heed them there can be no dis- 
puting the fact. Now, if an electric alarm can summon a 
servant to duty, why may not the inventor go farther, and 
so add to his device that it shall of its own motion do what 
needs to be done? Accordingly we find furnaces fitted up 
with electrical control, so that the draught is opened or fuel 
added when the temperature falls too low, or the draught 
is closed when the flame is too fierce ; if the fuel is gas this 
automatic stoking leaves nothing to be desired. 

In rough weather the propeller of a steamer is ever and 
anon lifted out of the water, and, thus relieved from work, 



FLAME ONCE MORE OUTDONE 175 

dashes round at excessive speed, jarring itself and the ship 
dangerously as it dips again into the sea. A recent inven- 
tion provides at the stern of the vessel an electrical lever 
which at the moment the ship '* heels " throttles the steam- 
valve of the engine, and minimises both shock and hazard. 
New mechanism of this sort is constantly being contrived. 
The inventor who began by conferring electric nerves on 
muscles of brass and iron has, by grace of electricity, gone 
the length of combining his wires and magnets into some- 
thing very like a conscious and responsive brain. His in- 
teUigence culminates in duplicating itself. 

All this has followed upon the mechanic's adding 
electricity to fire in the armoury of his resources. Flame 
acts directly within but a few inches at 
the farthest; its rays may be usefully Electricity Broadens 
transmitted for distances scarcely longer. ^^^ Field of Mechanics. 
The one mode of making it available to 
the mechanic is to build a heat-engine, and derive from its 
elastic gases a quantum of power which is never, at the 
most, but a modest fraction of the energy applied. An 
electric motor is incomparably simpler and more adaptable 
than a heat-engine, while thoroughly economical of the 
energy it receives. And mechanical motion, whether im- 
parted to ropes, belts, or wires, has but narrow play — a 
mile or two at most. Convert this power into electricity 
and the field of transmission is multiplied fortyfold. And 
all this because a magnet has the unique quality of receiv- 
ing molecular undulations not less swift than those of light, 
and translating them into the rotation of an armature that 
weighs tons and sweeps a circle measured in yards. 
Through this magic the electrical engineer commands me- 
chanical motion which rises instantly to his touch, obeys 
his will minutely, traverses a stretch of a hundred miles 
with small subtraction as it goes, and swings a locomotive 
as easily as it lifts a silken thread. 



176 ELECTRIC MACHINERY 

This chapter has touched upon points so diverse that 
it may be permissible to recall them in a closing word. 
Common mechanical motion is profitably superseded by 
electricity because its conductor moves not as a mass, but in 
its molecules ; the higher an electrical pressure, the narrower 
the path that it asks ; electricity is readily changed in in- 
tensity ; it makes a unit of a motor and a tool or machine ; 
it brings automaticity to its utmost bound, so that human 
initiation is effective as never before ; it is virtually a per- 
fect fluid, so that a single centre of power may replace with 
economy a score, a hundred, or a thousand engines inher- 
ited from pre-electric days. In its more refined apphca- 
tions it has an evenness and a delicacy unknown prior to 
its introduction ; it may be transmitted with full effect by 
the merest touch, or may perform its tasks at a distance, 
with no other medium than the universal ether; its pace is 
all but instantaneous, so that synchronism for the first time 
is available in apparatus scattered over a hundred leagues 
and more ; its waves, as complex as those of light, never- 
theless faithfully bear to a remote destination as intricate a 
series of impulses as those which stream from the sun. In 
every iota of these marvels the electric wave is in essence 
one and the same with the ray of flame, but how much has 
followed upon the abiUty to convert fire into a servant in- 
comparably more versatile — which conquers a thousand 
provinces beyond the horizon of the fire-kindler, however 
far-sighted and bold! 



CHAPTER XIII 

TELEGRAPHY — LAND LINES 

THE telegraph, one of the first pieces of mechanism to 
be actuated by electricity, may still be deemed the 
most important of all. For ages one of the principal uses 
of light was for the communication of 
intelligence ; it may be many a long day Precursors, 

before electricity is given a worthier 
task. In a previous chapter the employment of fire as a 
signaller was described, more especially as it served the 
aborigines of North America. In other parts of the world 
as ingenuity rose to new refinements the signals of a flame 
were diversified by changing its size, by separating blaze 
from blaze. When Troy fell before Agamemnon, in the 
eleventh century B. c, the news was borne to Clytem- 
nestra, the spouse of the conqueror, by a chain of beacons 
stretching from Mount Ida to the palace of the queen at 
Mycenae. Polybius, in the third century B. C, devised 
for service in the Punic Wars a simple telegraph in which 
an array of torches, by turns hidden and displayed, fore- 
showed the modern electric alphabet. That these torches 
might be replaced by shields or flags in the daytime does 
not seem to have occurred to any inventor for centuries, 
until, in 1680, Dr. Hooke, the famous English mechanician, 
devised an apparatus of coloured blocks, whose disposal was 
regulated by a pre-arranged code. 

177 



lyS TELEGRAPHY— LAND LINES 

Across the Channel there was to be contrived in France 
a telegraph more ingenious still — nothing short of the pa- 
rent of the semaphores which to this hour swing their col- 
oured lanterns by night and arms by day over the tracks of 
railroads. Toward the end of the eighteenth century there 
were three brothers Chappe, all students, one at the Sem- 
inary of Angers, the other two at a private school a little 
more than a mile from the town. Claude, the seminarian, 
wishing to communicate with his brothers, fastened to a 
bar of wood two wing-pieces, movable at pleasure. He 
could thus produce signals clearly visible to the spy-glass 
of his brethren. 

The first public exhibition of the contrivance took place 
in 1 791; after the device had been materially improved 
it was adopted by the government of France, and, in 1793, 
brought from the frontier to Paris the news of the capture 
of Conde from the Austrians. In forms variously modified, 
the Chappe telegraph found its way to Denmark, Belgium, 
and Germany, to Sweden and Russia. On a plan specially 
adapted to the service of scouting and exploring parties, to 
travellers unable to cumber themselves with weighty ap- 
paratus, another group of inventors combined flags and 
streamers in such wise as to communicate with readiness 
and ease. This is the system common in the mercantile 
marine ; it forms one of the diverse telegraphic resources 
of both armies and navies. A more important auxiliary in 
military manoeuvres and in the service of the Weather 
Bureau, the heliograph, is much the most efficient device 
of its class. It employs a small mirror, so accurately sur- 
faced and poised as to send a beam of light as far as twenty- 
five miles. Usually this beam is interrupted by the hand 
or a sheet of cardboard so as to spell out words in the 
Morse alphabetic code. 

All these contrivances, old or new, suffer from serious 
restrictions. They are available for the most part only for 



BEGINNINGS 179 

short distances, comparatively speaking; they are useless 
when an object comes between the signal and the distant 
eye ; in fog, or mist, or storm, they pass from sight. The 
light which gives direction or warning, declares distress, or 
tells a story, runs only in straight lines, which must suffer 
no interruption in their course, moderate though that course 
may be. When light gives place to her twin sister elec- 
tricity, it is as if a ray were confined to a path no broader 
than a wire, and followed the metal through every twist 
and turning for miles. Sunshine or darkness, storm or 
calm, makes little difference to the electric throb ; it bears 
a message as distinctly beneath the Atlantic as across a 
county. Little danger of signals being read by a foe when 
not only the means but the very fact of communication is 
concealed. 

The pioneers of electric telegraphy were many ; we can 
recall only a few of them. In 1 747 Dr. William Watson, in 
London, sent a flash through 12,276 feet 
of wire, and observed its transit to be Pioneers, 

instantaneous. This, however, was not 
telegraphy, but simply the proving that frictional electricity 
could be sent for a comparatively long distance. It was Le 
Sage of Geneva who, in 1774, constructed the first actual 
telegraph. He suspended twenty-four insulated wires, and 
apportioned a letter of the alphabet to each of them. To 
the end of every wire a pair of pith-balls was suspended. 
Whenever the opposite end of a line was in communication 
with the conductor of an electrical machine, the two balls 
of that line became similarly electrified and flew apart. 
Lomond of Paris saw how these twenty-four wires might be 
reduced to one wire by using a single pair of pith-balls and 
denoting each letter by a certain number of divergencies. 
An apparatus on the plan of signalling by sparks was set 
up by Salva, in Madrid, in i 798, and gave fair results over 
a line nearly half a mile in length. It was thus plainly 



i8o TELEGRAPHY— LAND LINES 

demonstrated that an electric telegraph, for short distances 
at least, was perfectly feasible. 

But the kind of electricity which thus far had been em- 
ployed was suited only to experiments curious rather than 
useful. The lightning of a frictional machine sent into the 
wire was too extreme in its tension, and too minute in its 
quantity, for a really practical telegraph. To insulate the 
conducting metal for more than two miles or so was barely 
possible, while the impulses at the end of their journey 
were too much enfeebled to be trustworthy as signals. 
What was needed was the steady flow of electricity from 
dissolving metal, which Volta, in 1800, provided in the cells 
of his battery. In 1809 Sommering applied the voltaic 
current for the first time in the service of a telegraph ; but 
unfortunately he relied upon the power of the current to 
decompose water, and this slow process rendered his at- 
tempts of no avail. In 18 16 Francis Ronalds erected a 
telegraph which used frictional shocks; his rare ingenuity 
thus misdirected came to nothing. Why, we may ask, did 
so able a man take an utterly wrong path? We should 
remember that at the time of Ronalds the identity of 
electricity from friction and from chemical solution was 
far from clear, and that until Daniell invented his cell, in 
1836, there was no voltaic battery yielding a fairly constant 
stream. 

Next in importance for telegraphy to the contrivance of 
the cell by Volta, and of its improved form by Daniell, 
was the discovery by Orsted, in 1820, of the deflection of 
a compass-needle as a current sped through a neighbouring 
wire. Here, to the clear eye of Ampere, was a means of 
receiving a message at once more forcible and trustworthy 
than any swing of the pith-balls of early experiment. 
Schweigger, also in 1820, discovered that the deflecting 
power of a current was multiplied when he wound a coil 
of wire round the needle instead of using a solitary wire. 



HENRY, THE LEADER 181 

He thus constructed the first galvanometer, an instrument 
since refined to the utmost dehcacy as a measurer of ex- 
tremely minute currents. When, four years later. Stur- 
geon invented the electromagnet a new and invaluable 
gift was handed to telegraphy as well as to other electric 
arts. 

Joseph Henry, in 183 1, was engaged as a teacher at the 
Albany Academy, in Albany, New York, where, as we have 
already noted in a preceding chapter, he 
had much improved the electromagnet Practical Success, 
devised by Sturgeon. He now employed 
it for the first electromagnetic telegraph, which is thus 
described in his own words : 



I arranged, around one of the upper rooms in the Albany 

Academy, a wire of more than a mile in length, through which I 

was enabled to make signals by sounding 

a bell. The mechanical arrangement for 

effecting this object was simply a steel 

bar, permanently magnetised, of about ten 

inches in length, supported on a pivot, and 

placed with its north end between the two 

arms of a horseshoe magnet. When the 

latter was excited by the current, the end 

of the bar, thus placed, was attracted by yig. 54. 

one arm of the horseshoe and repelled ^ ^ , , 

, 1 Henry telegraph, 

by the other, and was thus caused to move 

in a horizontal plane, and its farther extremity to strike a bell 

suitably adjusted (Fig. 54). 



In 1833 Professor Weber built a Hne of telegraph which, 
instead of being confined within the walls of a room, went 
forth into the open. It connected the Observatory of Got- 
tingen with the Cabinet of Physics, and was about six thou- 
sand feet in length. The use of this line was purely in the 
interests of electrical science ; the motions of its galva- 
nometer were read not as a means of communication but as 
denoting how a current was affected by a journey through 




i82 TELEGRAPHY— LAND LINES 

so long a conductor. In 1837 Steinhell built a line from 
the Royal Academy, Munich, to the Observatory, Bogen- 
hausen, a distance of three miles. Felt was used as the 
insulator, and proved very defective. The first line 
constructed in England, two years later, was a success 
from the outset. It joined the Paddington Station of the 
Great Western Railway, in London, to West Drayton, 
thirteen miles off. Its designers, Wheatstone and Cooke, 
inclosed six copper wires in a wrought-iron tube an inch 
and a half in diameter, laid six inches above the ground 
alongside the railway. The wires within the tube were 
insulated from each other by a covering of hemp. In 
1842 Cooke adopted the plan of suspending the wires 
on poles, and of insulating them by conical supports of 
stone or earthenware, soon discarded for porcelain and 
glass. 

In America telegraphy still remained in the experimental 
stage. Morse, in 1832, conceived the idea of an electric 
telegraph, and, in complete ignorance of what Henry and 
other inventors had accomplished, began the making of 
instruments and experimental lines. In 1837 he exhibited 
the successful transmission of a message through i 700 feet 
of copper wire stretched about the walls of a room in the 
University of the City of New York, in Washington Square. 
In his further efforts Morse now associated himself with 
Alfred Vail, to whose ingenuity the alphabet known by the 
name of Morse is really due. As originally designed the 
telegraph of Morse transmitted only numerals, and these 
were interpreted by means of a dictionary whose words 
were numbered. In devising his alphabet, Mr. Vail con- 
sulted with the type-setters employed upon the local news- 
paper at his home, Morristown, New Jersey. They informed 
him that the most frequently used letter was e, and recognis- 
ing that it should have the quickest made sign, he gave it 
a single dot. To the other letters he assigned the easiest 



THE PUBLIC HESITATES 183 

made dot-and-dash characters in accordance with their 
relative frequency of use.^ 

In 1843, after a prolonged struggle, Congress voted 
Morse a grant of $30,000 wherewith to build an experi- 
mental Hne from the capital to Baltimore. The next year, 
on the completion of the work, a convincing proof was 
given of the value of electrical communication. The Na- 
tional Convention to nominate a President was sitting in 
Baltimore. James K. Polk had been nominated for the 
Presidency ; Senator Silas Wright, then in Washington, for 
the Vice-Presidency. Mr. Vail telegraphed this to Mr. 
Morse, who immediately told Senator Wright. His re- 
sponse, forthwith transmitted to Baltimore, was a respectful 
declination. The convention could not believe the mes- 
sage to be authentic, and accordingly despatched a com- 
mittee to Washington to confer with their nominee. The 
telegram was, of course, confirmed, and the fame of elec- 
tricity as a messenger went the length and breadth of the 
Union. 

Despite this triumph of the great initial experiment, 
there was disappointment in store for Morse and his fellow- 
workers. While the investigator and the inventor have 
their parts to play in the prorhotion of science and its ap- 
plication to the useful arts, the public, also, has something 
to do with the success of their toil. Without an enlight- 
ened demand for the telegraph all the labours of Morse, and 
of the predecessors from whom he inherited so much, would 
have been fruitless. On April i, 1845, the line from Wash- 
ington to Baltimore, which had been worked as a curiosity, 

1 The code known as the Morse is as follows : 

A.-E-...C.. . D-..E.F.-.G .H..., 

I..J-.-.K-.-L M N — . O . . P . . . . . 

Q..-.R. ..S...T-U..-V...-W. 

X . - .. Y .... Z ....&... . 

I. .2.. -..3... -.4.... -5 

b 7 ..8 — ....9 — ..— o 



i84 



TELEGRAPHY— LAND LINES 



was opened for public business. Its income for the first 
nine days of operation was $3.09^.^ If the pubhc had not 
soon awakened to what the telegraph stood ready to do 
for them, the enterprise would have perished in its cradle. 
As lines were lengthened from the needs of experiment 
to meet the demands of comnierce and the press, there 
arose important questions of mechanical detail, of disposal, 

and of insulation. 
In Chapter XII 
a word was said 
about the high 
value of a feeble 
current as it starts 
off currents vastly 
stronger than itself, 
much as if a giant 
at the touch of a 
babe delivered a 
^ tremendous blow. 
In a telegraphic 
relay, the arriving 
impulse, very weak 
though it may be, is still equal to making one wire touch 
another, thus bringing into play a powerful local current, 

1 During the first four days the receipts amounted to one cent. This was 
obtained from an office-seeker, who said that he had nothing else than a twenty- 
dollar bill and one cent, and, with the modesty of his class, wanted to see the 
operation free. This was refused because against orders. He was then told that 
he could have a cent's worth of telegraphy, to which he agreed. He was 
gratified in the following manner : Washington asked Baltimore," 4 ? " which 
meant in the list of signals, "What time is it?" Baltimore rephed, " i," 
which meant, " One o'clock." This was one character each way, which, accord- 
ing to the tariff, would amount to half a cent. The man paid his one cent, de- 
clined the change, and went his way. This was the revenue for four days. 
On the fifth 12^ cents were received. The sixth was the Sabbath. On the 
seventh the revenue ran -up to 60 cents. On the eighth to $1.32. On the 
ninth they were $1.04. — James D. Reid, The Telegraph in America. New 
York, 1886. 




Fig. 55. 
Telegraph relay. 



ONE WIRE ENOUGH 185 

which either speeds a message for a farther stage of its 
journey, or actuates a local sounder which utters the mes- 
sage in loud, unmistakable tones (Fig. 55), The armature 
lever L plays between two stops, Z^, 4, under the influence 
of attraction by the electromagnet R and the retractile 
spiral spring. When attracted by R, the lever closes the 
circuit, through the local battery e, the stop ^j ^i^d the 
sounder vS. AB is the main-line circuit. 

Discovery as well as invention has smoothed the path of 
telegraphy. In 1872 Joseph B. Stearns showed how a 
single wire can bear two messages at once ; on trunk-lines, 
always busy, he thus cut down the cost of wires by one- 
half. His method will be described in Chapter XV.- 
Thirty-six years before his achievement a remarkable dis- 
covery reduced in the same proportion all wires, whether 
those of main lines or any other. In 1838 Steinheil ex- 
perimented on the line of the Niirnberg-Fiirther Railroad 
with a view to ascertaining if the track could be used in- 
stead of one of the two ordinary telegraphic wires. He ob- 
served that the current passed from one 
rail to another through the earth. It 
occurred to him that it might be feasible 
to use the ground itself as the return half 
of a circuit and thus dispense with the 
costly return wire. An experiment, forth- 
with entered upon, satisfied him of the 
correctness of his surmise. Before this 
great discovery every telegraphic circuit 
had demanded two complete lengths 

of wire, both connected to the instru- _ 

Fig. 56. 
ments at the ends of a line. Ever since r. .■ • ., 

Grounding a circuit. 
Steinheil's decisive experiment broad 

plates or sheets of metal buried in the ground, and attached 

to both ends of a line, have taken the place of the long and 

costly second wire once deemed indispensable (Fig. 56). 




i86 TELEGRAPHY— LAND LINES 

The telegraph-key K in its normal position is kept in con- 
tact with stop 3 by means of a spring, and thus main- 
tains the line-wire in connection with the earth through 
the plate E. When the key is depressed 2 is brought into 
contact with i, and the current from the battery B sends 
a signal through the Hne. 

How best to dispose the wires of a telegraph was not at 
first very clear. For the inaugural line from Washington 
to Baltimore Morse began by adopting the plan of burying 
his wares, covered with cotton and shellac, and drawn 
through lead pipes. When ten miles of this cable had 
been laid it proved a total failure. At the instance of Ezra 
Cornell, the wires were now placed on poles, after the fash- 
ion introduced by Cooke in England. The result was a 
gratifying success. Year by year much was learned as 
aerial wires were compared with subterranean — for in some 
cases, as in railroad tunnels and the like, it was necessary to 
carry wires underground. It was ascertained that the air 
retarded a signal scarcely at all, while the earth held it 
back perceptibly if the line were long. This early study 
of induction had important developments, as we shall 
presently see when we consider telegraphic wires submerged 
beneath the Atlantic Ocean. 

Insulation, too, was a matter of moment from the first. 
Cornell's original insulators were small pieces of common 
window-glass, which he fastened above and below a wire 
(Fig. 57). Retaining the material, the 
form was soon changed for the conical 
shape now familiar. In England, where 
p the damp air readily deposits moisture 

First glass insulator. ^n glass, porcelain was soon introduced, 
and has now won its way the world 
over. At this point we may note a singular analogy be- 
tween light and electricity. Sunshine at high noon is 
blocked by a sheet of iron no thicker than tissue-paper. 



CIRCUITS LENGTHENED 187 

The opacity of the metal to the solar ray is paralleled 
by the imperviousness of glass to the electric pulse. Mr. 
A. E. Kennelly says that glass at ordinary temperatures is 
roughly ten thousand millions of millions of millions of 
times more resistant than copper. It is plain that although, 
in some degree or other, all substances are conductors, 
their quality is apt to be extreme in either goodness or 
badness. And we must not miss the fact that glass, which 
transmits light so well, obstructs electricity almost perfectly. 
Light consists in waves which vary little from 4000^0 oi an 
inch in length ; electric waves may be millions or even 
billions of times longer; from this difference in dimensions 
may arise their highly contrasted powers of penetration. 

Small though the loss at a single insulator on a telegraph- 
pole may be, that loss on a long line is multipHed by a high 
figure. If there are twenty-five poles to a mile, there are 
twenty-five thousand insulators on a stretch of a thousand 
miles, and their leakage in the aggregate plainly limits any 
single telegraphic circuit. In lengthening circuits, much 
has been done by improving the quality of the conductor. 
Iron, which is in common use for comparatively short lines, 
has the merit of cheapness ; moreover, when galvanised, or 
coated with zinc, it resists atmospheric corrosion. The ad- 
vantage, too, of either iron or steel is that its great tensile 
strength permits the engineer to place his poles at twen- 
tieths of a mile on minor lines, thus reducing the number 
of insulators at which the current may escape. Of course, 
it was known at the outset of telegraphic practice that 
copper is a much better conductor than iron, and in no less 
a degree than sixfold. But copper as manufactured in 
those early days was impure, and the trace of arsenic which 
it sometimes held lowered its conductivity as much as two- 
fifths. Thanks, however, to electrolytic deposition, copper 
is now produced in all but absolute purity, while, through 
a suggestion of Mr. T. B. Doolittle of Boston, it is hard 



i88 TELEGRAPHY— LAND LINES 

drawn so as to compete with iron in strength without sacri^ 
fice of conducting quaHty. Hence it is that we have to- 
day copper telegraphic circuits a thousand miles in extent, 
whereas four hundred miles is the longest stretch possi- 
ble to iron. The copper circuit of looo miles has a re- 
sistance of but 4 ohms ; an iron circuit of 400 miles has a 
resistance of 19 ohms. For important trunk-lines it is 
deemed an advantage to employ the comparatively dear 
rnetal from its high efficiency and small liability to accident. 

Within a few weeks after its installation as a public servant 
both in Europe and America, the electric telegraph began 
its career as one of the chief resources 
The Gifts of the o^ civiHscd man. It was almost as if he 
Telegraph. could make his voice Ijeard at the ends 

of the earth ; there was all the gain that 
comes from knowing an event of importance at once instead 
of only after a messenger has finished a journey of days, 
or weeks, or even months. Incalculable were the allevia- 
tions of suffering and distress which at once became possible. 
When a threatening illness demanded the aid of a distant 
physician or surgeon, he could be summoned without the 
delay of a moment. If cholera, or other pest, invaded a 
port, the neighbouring country could be apprised forthwith, 
and set up its defences unperturbed by panic. 

In {Uncounted minor services the anxieties and suspense 
common in a former age are banished by the telegraph. 
The minute that a steamer comes near Sandy Hook, or 
Southampton, the news may be communicated to a pas- 
senger's family ; if an invalid goes to southern California, 
or to Italy, his friends in the North may have a daily bul- 
letin of his health as new scenes and balmy air work their 
restoration. In a tho'isand ways the telegraph gives us 
new safeguards against accident and loss of life. A sudden 
ice-shove covers the track of a bridge over the St. Law- 
rence ; instantly a despatch prevents a train from entering 



ELECTRIC UBIQUITY 189 

the structure. A steamboat is about to put out to sea 
at its usual hour; word comes from the Weather Bureau 
that the storm which seems but moderate is Hkely to 
rise to fury in a few hours; the captain heeds the warn- 
ing, and escapes destruction for himself, his passengers, and 
his crew. 

Less important, but quite as striking, are the benefits 
which the telegraph confers by making human effort more 
efficient than when it was ignorant of facts bearing vitally 
upon the gainfulness of its tasks. A vessel is despatched 
from Yokohama to San Francisco, and whither it shall next 
turn its prow depends upon instructions from the owners in 
Liverpool. It may carry harvesting -machinery to Sydney, 
New South Wales, or take a cargo of wheat to Glasgow. 
A cotton-mill in Massachusetts is destroyed by fire. Before 
the hose has ceased to play upon its smoking walls new 
looms are being packed in Lancashire to take the first 
steamer to Boston. The owner of that mill, as he scans 
his newspaper every morning and night, can learn to the 
hundredth part of a cent how much his raw cotton will cost 
him if he buys it now, to meet in advance nearly a year's 
requirement. Quotations of ''futures" such as these are 
possible because thousands of observers in the cotton belt, 
the iron regions, the copper country, are telegraphing 
their reports day by day to the exchanges of the world. 
Money, to-day, has all the fluidity of electricity itself. 
Across national frontiers, or divided by the breadth of half 
the planet, bankers are in the closest touch. If money is 
scarce in London, New. York extends immediate aid ; if 
Berlin or Amsterdam offers a new loan, investors in Chi- 
cago and Philadelphia may subscribe as soon as if they 
dwelt in the German or the Dutch capital. Modern wars 
dismiss through the telegraph one of the horrors incident 
to ancient modes of communication. Before electric teleg- 
raphy it sometimes happened that battles were fought days, 



igo TELEGRAPHY— LAND LINES 

or even weeks, after a formal treaty of peace had been 
signed by the principals concerned. 

Let us note a typical case or two of the economic revo- 
lution wrought by the telegraph. A manufacturer of 
tweeds in Scotland sends his travelling agents to every 
quarter of the globe, and requires them, on occasion, to 
supplement their letters with despatches which may mean 
a sentence in a word — thanks to the ingenuity of code- 
makers. He thus avoids weaving so much as a single 
yard of cloth for chance sale, and the cost and risk of 
keeping a large variety of goods for inspection is abolished. 
The same method it is which more and more puts the small 
premises of the commission agent, with its cupboard of 
samples, where stood the large and expensive warehouse 
which was formerly the sole means of bringing together 
the manufacturer and the merchant. 

In a field indefinitely broader the master of a great in- 
dustry — iron-mining, steel-making, the refining of oil or 
sugar — is seated at the centre of a vast web, from which 
he observes and regulates a thousand subordinates, and 
makes the rill of gain that each creates converge with the 
utmost directness into one huge reservoin It is the tele- 
graph which gives a thousand facets to the eyes of such a 
man as this, and enables him to act the part of a leader to 
an orchestra of stupendous proportions and diversity. We 
must bear in mind that often the more comprehensive a 
business becomes the simpler it grows in important respects. 
If one concern operates a mine, and another works up the 
iron from its ore into bars, rails, and plates, there is abun- 
dant opportunity for misunderstandings and maladjustments 
between the two. All these disappear when the two con- 
cerns unite. Under a single chief a falling off in the de- 
mand for rails will be immediately reflected in the reduced 
pay-roll of the mine. If a wire-mill has been included in 
the combination, an active market for wire will lead at once 



THE WORLD ONE MARKET 191 

to a score or a hundred hands being brought into that mill 
from some other department of the works. Between every 
subdivision of the business there will be complete harmony, 
with the result that products will be created and distributed 
at lower cost than before. 

By an industrial king sufficiently able the whole Union, 
or even the world itself, may be organised as a single 
market, whose wants may be systematically ascertained, 
and as systematically supplied from the trade centre of 
each territorial division. With the undisputed control of 
such a business credit is not unduly cheapened, as when 
competition runs riot, and indeed credit may be totally 
abolished ; in either case one of the chief perplexities of 
ordinary trade — the estimation of risks — disappears from 
the manager's mind. By a unification of control, backed 
by abundant capital, any new improvement in machinery 
or process is introduced at once throughout every ramifi- 
cation of the central control. From first to last it is the 
telegraph which gives regimentation to such an enterprise 
as this, so that at last the economy which electricity confers 
upon production is paralleled by the saving it affords to 
distribution. 

" To him that hath shall be given " takes on a new force 
when industrial and financial might thus add to the wings 
of the wind and the hot breath of steam the lightning 
courser of Wheatstone and Morse. We have noticed in a 
previous chapter how profitable are the consolidations of 
power inaugurated in the engine-room and machine-shop 
by the wand of the electrician ; we now see that his work 
is equally gainful in the empire of commerce and trade. 
The streams of production and of transportation at his bid- 
ding take on all the fluidit)^ of the agent he employs. 
That mills, refineries, and factories have come to the end of 
their consolidations no competent observer believes. The 
process, when wisely ordered, is as much in the line of 



192 TELEGRAPHY— LAND LINES 

economy as the division of labour in cotton manufacture, 
which came in with Arkwright and Watt. Now that to 
the old heat-engines is added the might conferred by the 
new servant, electricity, there arises no such minor question 
as that of bringing to accord the various tasks of the oper- 
atives under a single roof, but, instead, a larger problem, 
nothing less than the sweeping unification of a whole in- 
dustry, represented though it may be in a thousand manu- 
facturing concerns. Here physics and politics touch 
hands. How, we may ask, are the powers of the trusts 
and consolidated railroads to be restrained from tyranny 
and exaction? A pressing difficulty of the hour, mainly 
created by the electric wire, is how the advantages of com- 
plete industrial organisation may be enjoyed by the public 
without the oppressions of irresponsible power. 

The telegraph has another typical field free from per- 
plexity, and in the main one of benefit unalloyed. Mark 
the news columns of the press as they make the world a 
whispering-gallery and broaden the provincial view to the 
comprehension of the globe. The speeches of Parliament 
at Westminster are in the hands of readers in New York 
before the speakers have gone to their beds. The wrongs 
of the Armenian and the Finn, the explorations of old 
Egypt, and the voyages toward the antarctic pole are 
discussed together with the news of the county and the 
ward. The applause won by an American prima donna at 
the opera in Paris or Dresden, the reception of the Ameri- 
can ambassador as he is greeted by Queen Victoria at 
Windsor Castle, the progress toward confederation in the 
colonies of Australasia, all become part and parcel of the 
gossip of tea-tables in Wisconsin and Vermont. Thus there 
springs up that comity of nations which is so little furthered 
by an obvious wooing, and that declines to be promoted 
by the arguments of the Peace Society — for all the pathos 
of their appeal. 



CHAPTER XIV 

CABLE TELEGRAPHY 

ELECTRIC telegraphy on land has put a vast distance 
between itself and the apparatus of Chappe, just as 
the scope and availability of the French invention are in 
high. contrast with the rude signal-fires 

of the primitive savage. As the first Beginnings at New 

land telegraphs joined village to village, York and Dover. 
and city to city, the crossing of water 
came in as a minor incident; the wires were readily com- 
mitted to the bridges which spanned streams of moderate 
width. Where a river or inlet was unbridged, or a chan- 
nel was too wide for the roadway of the engineer, the 
question arose, May we lay an electric wire under water? 
With an ordinary land line, air serves as so good a non- 
conductor and insulator that as a rule cheap iron may be 
employed for the wire instead of expensive copper. In 
the quest for non-conductors suitable for immersion m 
rivers, channels, and the sea, obstacles of a stubborn kind 
were confronted. To overcome them demanded new 
materials, more refined instruments, and a complete revi- 
sion of electrical philosophy. 

As far back as 1795, Francisco Salva had recommended 
to the Academy of Sciences, Barcelona, the covering of 
subaqueous wires by resin, which is both impenetrable by 
water and a non-conductor of electricity. Insulators, in- 

193 



194 CABLE TELEGRAPHY 

deed, of one kind and another, were common enough, but 
each of them was defective in some quality indispensable 
for success. Neither glass nor porcelain is flexible, and 
therefore to lay a continuous line of one or the other was 
out of the question. Resin and pitch were even more faulty, 
because extremely brittle and friable. What of such fibres 
as hemp or silk, if saturated with tar, or some other good 
non-conductor? For very short distances under still water 
they served fairly well, but any exposure to a rocky beach 
with its chafing action, any rub by a passing anchor, was 
fatal to them. What the copper wire needed was a cover- 
ing impervious to water, unchangeable in composition by 
time, tough of texture, and non-conducting in the highest 
degree. Fortunately all these properties are united in 
gutta-percha and in nothing else known to art. Gutta- 
percha is the hardened juice of a large tree {Isonandra 
gutta) common in the Malay Archipelago; it is tough and 
strong, easily moulded when moderately heated. In com- 
parison with copper it is but e o,"o-o-o7(ro-o"oVo"o"o"7ro-o;oo o as con- 
ductive. As without gutta-percha there could be no ocean 
telegraphy, it is worth while recalling how it came within 
t'he purview of the electrical engineer. 

In 1843 Jose d' Almeida, a Portuguese engineer, pre- 
sented to the Royal Asiatic Society, London, the first speci- 
mens of gutta-percha brought to Europe. A few months 
later. Dr. W. Montgomerie, a surgeon, gave other specimens 
to the Society of Arts, of London, which exhibited them ; 
but it was four years before the chief characteristic of the 
gum was recognised. In 1847 ^r. S. T. Armstrong of 
New York, during a visit to London, inspected a pound or 
two of gutta-percha, and found it to be twice as good a 
non-conductor as glass. The next year, through his in- 
strumentality, a cable covered with this new insulator 
was laid between New York and Jersey City ; its success 
prompted Mr. Armstrong to suggest that a similarly pro- 



PIONEERING 



195 



tected cable be submerged between America and Europe. 
Eighteen years of untiring effort, impeded by the errors 
inevitable to the pioneer, stood between the proposal and 
its fulfilment. In 1848 the Messrs. Siemens laid under 
water in the port of Kiel a wire covered with seamless gutta- 
percha, such as, beginning with 1847, the}^ had employed 
for subterranean conductors. This particular wire was not 
used for telegraphy, but formed part of a submarine-mine 
system. In 1849 Mr. C. V. Walker laid an experimental 
line in the EngHsh Channel; he proved the possibihty of 
signalling for two miles through a wire covered with gutta- 
percha, and so prepared the way for a venture which joined 
the shores of France and England. 

In 1850 a cable 25 miles in length was laid from Dover 
to Calais, only 'to prove worthless from faulty insulation, 
and the lack of armour against dragging anchors and fretting 
rocks. In 1851 the experiment was repeated with success. 
The conductor now was not a single wire of copper, but 




Fig. 58. 
Calais-Dover cable, 185 1. 



four wires, wound spirally so as to combine strength with 
flexibility ; these were covered with gutta-percha and sur- 
rounded with tarred hemp. As a means of imparting 
additional strength, ten iron wires were wound round the 
hemp — a feature which has been copied in every subse- 



196 CABLE TELEGRAPHY 

quent cable (Fig. 58). The engineers were fast learning 
the rigorous conditions of submarine telegraphy; in its 
essentials the Dover-Calais line continues to be the type 
of deep-sea cables to-day. The success of the wire laid 
across the British Channel incited other ventures of the 
kind. Many of them, through careless construction or 
unskilful laying, were utter failures. At last, in 1855, a 
submarine line 171 miles in length gave excellent service, 
as it united Varna with Constantinople ; this was the great- 
est length of satisfactory cable until the submergence of an 
Atlantic line. 

In 1854 Cyrus W. Field of New York opened a new 
chapter in electrical enterprise as he resolved to lay a cable 
between Ireland and Newfoundland, 
The Atlantic Cable, aloug the shortest line that joins Eu- 
rope to America. He chose Valentia 
and Heart's Content, a Httle more than 1600 miles apart, 
as his termini, and at once began to enlist the co-operation 
of his friends. Although an unfaltering enthusiast when 
once his great idea had possession of him, Mr. Field was a 
man of strong common sense. From first to last he went 
upon well-ascertained facts; when he failed he did so 
simply because other facts, which he could not possibly 
know, had to be disclosed by costly experience. Messrs. 
Whitehouse and Bright, electricians to his company, were 
instructed to begin a preliminary series of experiments. 
They united a continuous stretch of wires laid beneath 
land and water for a distance of 2000 miles, and found that 
through this extraordinary circuit they could transmit as 
many as four signals per second. They inferred that an 
Atlantic cable would offer but little more resistance, and 
would therefore be electrically workable and commercially 
lucrative. 

In 1857 a cable was forthwith manufactured, divided in 
halves, and stowed in the holds of the Niagara of the 



A PROJECTOR AND HERO 197 

United States navy, and the Agamemnon of the British 
fleet. The Niagara sailed from Ireland ; the sister ship 
proceeded to Newfoundland, and was to meet her in mid- 
ocean. When the Niagara had run out 335 miles of her 
cable it snapped under a sudden increase of strain at the 
paying-out machinery ; all attempts at recovery were un- 
avaiHng, and the work for that year was abandoned. The 
next year it was resumed, a Hberal supply of new cable 
having been manufactured to replace the lost section, and 
to meet any fresh emergency that might arise. A new 
plan of voyages was adopted : the vessels now sailed to- 
gether to mid-sea, uniting there both portions of the cable ; 
then one ship steamed off to Ireland, the other to the New- 
foundland coast. Both reached their destinations on the 
same day, August 5, 1858, and, feeble and irregular though 
it was, an electric pulse for the first time now bore a mes- 
sage from hemisphere to hemisphere. After 732 despatches 
had passed through the wire it became silent forever. In 
one of these despatches from London, the War Office 
countermanded the departure of two regiments about to 
leave Canada for England, which saved an outlay of about 
$250,000. This widely quoted fact demonstrated with 
telling effect the value of cable telegraphy. 

Now followed years of struggle which would have dis- 
mayed any less resolute soul than Mr. Field. The Civil 
War had broken out, with its perils to 
the Union, its alarms and anxieties for The ordeai of Failure, 
every American heart. But while battle- 
ships and cruisers were patrolling the coast from Maine to 
Florida, and regiments were marching through Washington 
on their way to battle, there was no remission of effort on 
the part of the great projector. 

Indeed, in the misunderstandings which grew out of the 
war, and that at one time threatened international conflict, 
he plainly saw how a cable would have been a peace- 



igS CABLE TELEGRAPHY 

maker. A single word of explanation through its wire, 
and angry feelings on both sides of the ocean would have 
been allayed at the time of the Trent affair. In this 
conviction he was confirmed by the English press; the 
London Times said : *' We nearly went to war with 
America because we had no telegraph across the Atlantic." 
In 1859 the British government had appointed a com- 
mittee of eminent engineers to inquire into the feasibility 
of an Atlantic telegraph, with a view to ascertaining what 
was wanting for success, and with the intention of adding 
to its original aid in case the enterprise were revived. In 
July, 1863, this committee presented a report entirely fa- 
vourable in its terms, affirming *' that a well-insulated 
cable, properly protected, of suitable specific gravity, 
made with care, tested under water throughout its pro- 
gress with the best-known apparatus, and paid into the 
ocean with the most improved machinery, possesses every 
prospect of not only being successfully laid in the first 
instance, but may reasonably be relied upon to continue 
for many years in an efficient state for the transmission of 
signals." 

Taking his stand upon this indorsement, Mr. Field now 
addressed himself to the task of raising the large sum 
needed to make and lay a new cable which should be so 
much better than the old ones as to reward its owners with 
triumph. He found his English friends willing to venture 
the capital required, and without further delay the manu- 
facture of a new cable was taken in hand. In every detail 
the recommendations of the Scientific Committee were 
carried out to the letter, so that the cable of 1865 was in- 
comparably superior to that of 1858. First, the central 
copper wire, which was the nerve along which the light- 
ning was to run, was nearly three times larger than before. 
The old conductor was a strand consisting of seven fine 
wires, six laid round one, and weighed but 107 pounds to 



COURAGE UNFAILING 199 

the mile. The new was composed of the same number of 
wires, but weighed 300 pounds to the mile. It was made 
of the finest copper obtainable.^ 

To secure insulation, this conductor was first embedded 
in Chatterton's compound, a preparation impervious to 
water, and then covered with four layers of gutta-percha, 
which were laid on alternately with four thin layers of 
Chatterton's compound. The old cable had but three 
coatings of gutta-percha, with nothing between. Its en- 
tire insulation weighed but 261 pounds to the mile, while 
that of the new weighed 400 pounds.^ The exterior wires, 
ten in number, were of Bessemer steel, each separately wound 
in pitch-soaked hemp yarn, the shore ends specially pro- 
tected by 36 wires girdling the whole. Here was a com- 
bination of the tenacity of steel with much of the flexibility 
of rope. The insulation of the copper was so excellent as 
to exceed by a hundredfold that of the core of 1858 — 
which, faulty though it was, had, nevertheless, sufficed 
for signals. So much inconvenience and risk had been 
encountered in dividing the task of cable-laying between 
two ships that this time it was decided to charter a sin- 
gle vessel, the Great Eastern, which, fortunately, was large 
enough to accommodate the cable in an unbroken length. 
Foilhommerum Bay, about six miles from Valentia, was 
selected as the new Irish terminus by the company. Al- 
though the most anxious care was exercised in every detail, 
yet, when 11 86 miles had been laid, the cable parted in 
11,000 feet of water, and although thrice it was grappled 

1 The Gutta-percha Company of London manufactured the copper core 
and gutta-percha covering of the cable of 1858 ; the outer sheathing was 
furnished by Glass, Elliot & Co. of Greenwich and R. S. Newall & Co. of 
Birkenhead. The cables of 1865 and 1866 were manufactured at Greenwich 
by the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, formed from the 
Gutta-percha Company and Glass, Elliot & Co. 

2 Henry M. Field, History of the Atlantic Telegraph. New York, Scrib- 
ner, 1866. 



200 CABLE TELEGRAPHY 

and brought toward the surface, thrice it slipped off the 
grappling hooks and escaped to the ocean floor. 

Mr. Field was obliged to return to England and face as 
best he might the men whose capital lay at the bottom of 

the sea — perchance as worthless as so 

The Triumph of much Atlantic ooze. With heroic per- 

courage. sistencc he argued that all difficulties 

would yield to a renewed attack. There 
must be redoubled precautions and vigilance never for a 
moment relaxed. Everything that deep-sea telegraphy 
has since accomplished was at that moment daylight clear 
to his prophetic view. Never has there been a more signal 
example of the power of enthusiasm to stir cold-blooded 
men of business ; never has there been a more striking 
illustration of how much science may depend for success 
upon the intelligence and the courage of capital. Electri- 
cians might have gone on perfecting exquisite apparatus 
for ocean telegraphy, or indicated the weak points in the 
comparatively rude machinery which made and laid the 
cable, yet their exertions would have been wasted if men 
of wealth had not responded to Mr. Field's renewed appeal 
for help. Thrice these men had invested largely, and 
thrice disaster had pursued their ventures; nevertheless 
they had faith surviving all misfortunes for a fourth at- 
tempt. 

In 1866 a new company was organised, for two objects: 
first, to recover the cable lost the previous year and com- 
plete it to the American shore ; second, to lay another be- 
side it in a parallel course. The Gi'eat Eastern was again 
put in commission, and remodelled in accordance with the 
experience of her preceding voyage. This time the ex- 
terior wires of the cable were of galvanised iron, the better 
to resist corrosion. The paying-out machinery was recon- 
structed and greatly improved. On July 13, 1866, the huge 
steamer began running out her cable twenty-five miles north 



TRIUMPH AT LAST 201 

of the line struck out during the expedition of 1865 ; she 
arrived without mishap in Newfoundland on July 2"], 
and electrical communication was re-established between 
America and Europe. The steamer now returned to the 
spot where she had lost the cable a few months before; 
after eighteen days' search it was brought to the deck in 
good order. Union was effected with the cable stowed 
in the tanks below, and the prow of the vessel was once 
more turned to Newfoundland. On September 8 this 
second cable was safely landed at Trinity Bay. Misfor- 
tunes now were at an end ; the courage of Mr. Field knew 
victory at last ; the highest honours of two continents were 
showered upon him. 

'T is not the grapes of Canaan that repay, 
But the high faith that failed not by the way. 

What at first was as much a daring adventure as a busi- 
ness enterprise has now taken its place as a task no more 
out of the common than building a 
steamship, or rearing a cantalever bridge. J^ ^'^h^TT 

Given its price, which will include too Successors. 

moderate a profit to betray any expec- 
tation of failure, and a responsible firm will contract to lay 
a cable across the Pacific itself. In the Atlantic lines the 
uniformly low temperature of the ocean floor (about 4° C), 
and the great pressure of the superincumbent sea, co- 
operate in effecting an enormous enhancement both in the 
insulation and in the carrying capacity of the wire. As an 
example of recent work in ocean telegraphy let us glance at 
the cable laid in 1894, by the Commercial Cable Company 
of New York. It unites Cape Canso, on the northeastern 
coast of Nova Scotia, to Waterville, on the southwestern 
coast of Ireland. The central portion of this cable much re- 
sembles that of its predecessor in 1 866. Its exterior armour 
of steel wires is much more elaborate. The first part of 



202 



CABLE TELEGRAPHY 



Fig. 59 shows the details of manufacture: the central 
copper core is covered with gutta-percha,, then with jute, 
upon which the steel wires are spirally wound, followed 
by a strong outer covering. For the greatest depths at 
sea, type A is employed for a total length of 1420 miles; 
the diameter of this part of the cable is seven-eighths of an 
inch. As the water lessens in depth the sheathing increases 
in size until the diameter of the cable becomes 
I ~Q inches for 152 miles, as type B. The cable 
now undergoes a third enlargement, and then 
its fourth and last proportions are presented 
as it touches the shore, for a distance of if 




Fig. 59. 
Commercial cable, 1894. 



miles, where type C has a diameter of 2 J inches. The 
weights of material used in this cable are : copper wire, 495 
tons; gutta-percha, 315 tons; jute yarn, 575 tons; steel 
wire, 3000 tons; compound and tar, 1075 tons; total, 5460 
tons. The telegraph- ship Faraday, specially designed for 
cable-laying, accomplished the work without mishap. 

Electrical science owes much to the Atlantic cables, in 
particular to the first of them. At the very beginning it 
banished the idea that electricity as it passes through metal- 
lic conductors has anything like its velocity through free 
space. It was soon found, as Professor Mendenhall says, 
** that it is no more correct to assign a definite velocity to 



THE CABLE AS A TEACHER 203 

electricity than to a river. As the rate of flow of a river is 

determined by the character of its bed, its gradient, and 

other circumstances, so the velocity of 

an electric current is found to depend Lessons of the cabie. 

on the conditions under which the flow 

takes place." ^ Mile for mile the original Atlantic cable had 

twenty times the retarding effect of a good aerial line ; the 

best recent cables reduce this figure by nearly one-half. 

In an extreme form this slowing down reminds us of the 
obstruction of light as it enters the atmosphere of the earth, 
of the further impediment which the rays encounter if they 
pass from the air into the sea. In the main the causes 
which hinder a pulse committed to a cable are two : induc- 
tion, and the electrostatic capacity of the wire, that is, the 
capacity of the wire to take up a charge of its own, just as 
if it were the metal of a Leyden jar. 

Let us first consider induction. As a current takes its 
way through the copper core it induces in its surroundings 
a second and opposing current. For this the remedy is 
one too costly to be applied. Were a cable manufactured 
in a double fine, as in the best telephonic circuits, induc- 
tion, with its retarding and quenching effects, would be 
neutralised. Here the steel-wire armour which encircles 
the cable plays an unwelcome part. Induction is always 
proportioned to the conductivity of the mass in which 
it appears ; as steel is an excellent conductor, the armour 
of an ocean cable, close as it is to the copper core, has in- 
duced in it a current much stronger, and therefore more 
retarding, than if the steel wire were absent. 

A word now as to the second difficulty in working be- 
neath the sea — that due to the absorbing power of the 
line itself. An Atlantic cable, like any other extended 
conductor, is virtually a long, cylindrical Leyden jar, the 
copper wire forming the inner coat, and its surroundings 

1 A Century of Electricity. Boston, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1887. 



204 CABLE TELEGRAPHY 

the outer coat. Before a signal can be received at the 

distant terminus the wire must first be charged. The 

effect is somewhat Hke transmitting a signal through water 

which fills a rubber tube ; first of all the tube is distended, 

and its compression, or secondary effect, really transmits 

the impulse. A remedy for this is a condenser formed of 

alternate sheets of tin-foil and mica, 

^ -n C, connected with the battery, B, so 

= as to balance the electric charge of 

r^^^^g the cable wire (Fig. 60). In the first 

— Atlantic line an impulse demanded 

one-seventh of a second for its jour- 
I ney. This was reduced when Mr. 
Pj^ gQ Whitehouse made the capital dis- 

Condenser. covery that the speed of a signal is 

increased threefold when the wire 
is alternately connected with the zinc and copper poles of 
the battery. Sir WiUiam Thomson ascertained that these 
successive pulses are most effective when of proportioned 
lengths. He accordingly devised an automatic trans- 
mitter which draws a duly perforated strip of paper under 
a metallic spring connected with the cable. To-day 
250 to 300 letters are sent per minute instead of 15, as at 
first. 

In many ways a deep-sea cable exaggerates in an instruc- 
tive manner the phenomena of telegraphy over long' aerial 
lines. The two ends of a cable may be in regions of widely 
diverse electrical potential, or pressure, just as the readings 
of the barometer at these two places may differ much. If 
a copper wire were allowed to offer itself as a gateless 
conductor it would equalise these variations of potential 
with serious injury to itself. Accordingly the rule is 
adopted of working the cable not directly, as if it were a 
land line, but indirectly through condensers. As the throb 
sent through such apparatus is but momentary, the cable 



READING A MESSAGE 205 

is in no risk from the strong currents which would course 
through it if it were permitted to be an open channel. 

A serious error in working the first cables was in sup- 
posing that they required strong currents as in land lines 
of considerable length. The very reverse is the fact. Mr. 
Charles Bright, in Stibmarine Telegraphs, says: 

Mr. Latimer Clark had the conductor of the 1865 and 1866 
lines joined together at the Newfoundland end, thus forming an 
unbroken length of 3700 miles in circuit. He then placed some 
sulphuric acid in a very small silver thimble, with a fragment of 
zinc weighing a grain or two. By this primitive agency he suc- 
ceeded in conveying signals through twice the breadth of the 
Atlandc Ocean in httle more than a second of time after making 
contact. The deflections were not of a dubious character, but 
full and strong, from which it was manifest that an even smaller 
battery would suffice to produce somewhat similar effects. 

At first in operating the Atlantic cable a mirror galva- 
nometer was employed as a receiver. The principle of this 
receiver has often been illustrated by a mischievous boy 
as, with a slight and almost imperceptible motion of his 
hand, he has used a bit of looking-glass to dart a ray of 
reflected sunlight across a wide street or a large room. 




Fig. 61. 

Reflecting galvanometer. 

Z, lamp ; N', moving spot of light reflected from mirror. 

On the same plan, the extremely minute motion of a gal- 
vanometer, as it receives the successive pulsations of a 
message, is magnified by a weightless lever of light so that 



2o6 



CABLE TELEGRAPHY 




Fig. 62. 
Siphon recorder. 



the words are easily read by an operator (Fig. 61). This 

beautiful invention comes from the hands of Sir William 
Thomson, who, more than any other electrician, has made 

ocean telegraphy an established 
success. 

In another receiver, also of 
his design, the siphon recorder, 
he began by taking advantage 
of the fact, observed long before 
by Bose, that a charge of elec- 
tricity stimulates the flow of 
a liquid. In its original form 
the ink-well into which the si- 
phon dipped was insulated and 
charged to a high voltage by 
an influence-machine; the ink, 
powerfully repelled, was spurted from the siphon-point to 
a moving strip of paper beneath (Fig. 62). It was afterward 
found better to use a delicate mechanical shaker which 
throws out the ink in minute drops as the cable current 
gently sways the siphon back and forth (Fig. 63). 

Minute as the current is which suffices for cable teleg- 
raphy, it is essential that the metallic circuit be not only 
unbroken, but un- 
impaired through- 
out. No part of his 
duty has more se- 
verely taxed the 
resources of the 
electrician than to discover the breaks and leaks in his 
ocean cables. One of his methods is to pour electricity, as it 
were, into a broken wire, much as if it were a narrow tube, 
and estimate the length of the wire (and consequently the 
distance from shore to the defect or break) by the quantity 
of current required to fill it. 



Fig. 63. 
Siphon record. " Arrived yesterday." 



AS 




Plate IV 



From photograph by London Stereoscopic Co. 
LORD KELVIN. 



CHAPTER XV 

MULTIPLEX TELEGRAPHY 

AS long as rays of light were the sole resource of the 
X\^ signaller, all that he did, or could do, was to send a 
single message at a time. When telegraphy passed from 
light to electricity as its agent, it became possible to send 
two, and afterward many, messages over a wire at the 
same instant. In Chapter XII was mentioned the Gray 



5 ooo o~o oo o r a T o ^ 



p © ooo \^-'yco 



Hashes 



MB. 



Fig. 64. 
Delany perforated message, "telegraphy." 

harmonic method of making a wire carry at the same 
moment several messages unconfused. We noted also 
one of the inventions of Mr. P. B. Delany for increasing 
the capacity of a wire by sending messages at a rate pos- 

207 



2o8 MULTIPLEX TELEGRAPHY 

sible only to fingers of brass and steel. In this system a 

despatch is first expressed in perforations by a suitable 

machine. The strip of paper is then rolled 

Two Messages Go bctwccn two pairs of wirc brushes press- 
Together in One . 11,, , T , 
DirectioHo ^^S toward each other above and below 

the paper (Fig. 64). The top brushes are 
electrically one, and are connected to the line L. The bot- 
tom brushes are insulated from each other, one being con- 
nected to the positive, the other to the negative, pole of 
the transmitting battery, MB. This battery is connected 
to the earth at its middle. The symbols A, as received, 
signify '' telegraphy," a line by itself meaning a dot, two 
parallel lines meaning a dash. 

The same result, the increased capacity of a line, has 
been accomplished by various other modes ; we shall com- 
mence a brief review of them by a glance at the diplex 
system, by which two messages are sent in the same direc- 
tion at the same time. First of all, let us note that this 
feat could be readily accomplished by simple mechanical 
means. Says Mr. Charles L. Buckingham : 

A long rod might be moved backward and forward along its 
axis by one operator to ring a gong, while at the same time a 
second operator could rotate the rod about its axis to move a 
flag or turn the hand of a dial. Two transmissions could also be 
effected by the action of water in a single pipe. If a section of 
the pipe were of glass, a valve placed within it could be made 
visibly to move to and fro, and by the forward and backward 
flow thus caused to indicate signals of one message, while signals 
of a second message could independently and simultaneously be 
indicated by increased pressure, shown by the height of fluid in a 
vertical-pressure gauge.i 

No such schemes as these have ever been practically 
worked out, simply because they would not be worth while. 
Better and cheaper modes are available ; with electricity as 
the agent, it becomes both easy and profitable to give a 

'^Electricity in Daily Life. New York, Scribner, 1891. 



VALUE OF DIVERSE POLARITY 209 

metallic conductor two distinct impulses. Let us note the 
means by which one of these impulses is sent forward and 
received. A current of say 40 volts is caused to flow con- 
tinuously through the telegraph hne; the armature at the 
receiving end has so strong a spring as to be unmoved by 
this current as it excites an electromagnet; to overcome 
the spring's resistance the distant operator must use his 
key to introduce to the line a current of say 100 additional 
volts, when the armature at once responds. Now this 
armature is of common soft iron (see Z, Fig. 55), as in the 
ordinary telegraph practice where only one despatch at a 
time need be sent over a wire ; the iron is indifferent to the 
polarity of the electromagnet which it faces. A face of 
north polarity in the electromagnet will induce south polar- 
ity in the soft iron opposite to it ; a face of south polarity 
in the electromagnet will induce north polarity in the soft 
iron ; in either case there is instant attraction. 

Currents may differ in strength ; they may also differ in 
the polarity they create in electromagnets ; and here the 
inventor finds a second opportunity for his skill. Let us 
observe a telegraphic circuit of the simplest kind, actuated 
by a cell consisting of a zinc and a copper plate immersed 
in an acid solution ; within its circuit is an electromagnet. 
At the end of its heHx, which is joined to the copper plate, 
a north pole appears ; at 

the other end, joined to ^^ jT ^^^ ^ ^^fi^^ f^ ^ ^ 

the zinc plate, a nega- 
tive pole is presented 

(Fig. 65). If we change g^OT Fig. 65. 

the connections of the 1^^^^^ Simple electromagnet, 

helix, copper for zinc, 

and zinc for copper, as we may easily do with a reversing-- 
key, a north pole will appear where we had a south pole, 
and vice versa. Let us now sketch the application of this 
principle to diplex telegraphy (Fig. 66). Around the elec- 




210 



MULTIPLEX TELEGRAPHY 




^Z 



Fig. 66. 

Signalling by reversing 
polarity. In both cases 
AIV xs, a north pole, 
AS 3. south pole. 



tromagnet Y a current is constantly flowing, as in the pre- 
ceding case, at 40 volts ; its effect is to make a south pole 
of the upper face BS. The armature J/ is a permanent 
magnet always presenting a south pole to F, so that be- 
tween the two adjacent faces there 
JVI is only repulsion, without telegraphic 
effect. But the instant that a reversing- 
key is depressed Fis changed to the 
condition of ^; its upper face becomes 
a north pole and forthwith attracts the 
south pole of M, delivering a signal. 
Thus an operator who sends no cur- 
rent whatever into a 
line, but simply re- 
verses the' direction 
of the current already 
there, can send a distinct message of his 
own. The first operator whom we de- 
scribed meanwhile transmits his message 
solely by increasing the strength of the 
line current, regardless of the polarity 
which that current may confer upon the 
working face of the distant electromagnet 
at the receiving-station. Without the 
slightest confusion, the two despatches take 
their way together over the same wire. 

As a rule in telegraphic practice it is 
preferable that the double capacity of a 
wire should be such as to permit mes- 
sages to be sent from both terminals at 
the same time, rather than that two de- 
spatches should proceed in company from 
one terminal. Accordingly, we have du- 
plex systems which perform this feat, and incidentally ex- 
hibit the divisibility which electricity alone of all phases 





Fig. 67. 

Double-wound elec- 
tromagnet. 



A WIRE'S DUTY DOUBLED 



211 



of energy offers the inventor in perfection. For brevity's 
sake but one of these plans will be described. Its success 
depends on departing in a new way from 
the simplicity of the common electro- '^'^° Messages Go 

^ •' Together in Opposite 

magnet. That device has a single coil of Directions, 

wire through which a current invariably 
excites the core to magnetism. Now if the core is wound 
with two equal and separate coils, as shown in the dotted 
and the solid lines (Fig. 67), two equal and contrary currents 
of electricity sent through their wires will neutralise each 
other as they course around the iron, and hence will leave 
it unmagnetised. 

Such a contrivance is the essential feature of an impor- 
tant form of duplex telegraph (Fig. 68). A and B are two 
stations, P and P' are their receiving-instruments, and K 




MIK^n 



r-rzi-i 




Fig. 68. 
Duplex telegraph. 



and K' their transmitting-keys. Let us imagine an operator 
at A depressing his key. As he does so his battery current 
is divided in halves ; one half goes into the line running to 
B\ the other half enters a short line, Ry of equal resistance 
— which may be a few feet of fine German silver. A'?> 
local electromagnet P is double wound (Fig. 67), and re- 
ceives into its two coils both currents; as they are equal 
and opposed the soft iron core is unmagnetised. But at 
the distant station B the receiving-electromagnet P\ as 



212 



MULTIPLEX TELEGRAPHY 



it takes in one-half of the whole current of the battery at 
Ay instantly attracts its armature and delivers its signals. 
All this is true if we consider B as the sending and A as 
the receiving station. When the sending-key K' is de- 
pressed it does not affect the local electromagnet, but the 
distant instrument at A utters a chck. By this ingenious 
balancing of currents it is thus feasible to send two mes- 
sages simultaneously in opposite directions (Fig. 68).^ 

The duplex telegraph in its original forms suffered from 
a serious defect. A telegraph-wire retains part of each elec- 
tric impulse as an electrostatic charge. This charge is not 
neutralised, as it should be, on an artificial line of small 
dimensions from sheer insufficiency of surface. In 1872 
Joseph B. Stearns of Boston remedied the difficulty by intro- 

1 A hydraulic analogy of the process is due to Professor T. C. Menden- 
hall, and appears in his Century of Electricity. " Suppose that two persons 
living in a city supplied with a system of water-works desire to establish tele- 
graphic communication with each other by means of water. Connection be- 
tween the two points is made by means of a small pipe of iron or other suit- 
able material, into which water from either end can be forced by opening a 
stop-cock. Some device will be needed to show the passage of the current, 

and this might be a small inclosed 
water-wheel, with a suitable index, 
which is made to turn by the flow 
of water around it. The essential 
features of such an arrangement 
are shown in the diagram [Fig. 69]. 
The two stations are identical. The 
stream of water, before entering the 
box containing the wheel, is divided 
into two parts, one of which flows 
around the wheel in one direction 
and thence into the 'line.' The other passes round the wheel in :he 
opposite direction, and is emptied through a narrow or crooked pipe. Water 
is admitted by turning the stop-cock a or b, which diifers from the ordinary 
gas- or water-cock in that an additional opening is provided ; so that when the 
cock is closed, as a is represented, thus obstructing the passage from the street 
main, water from above, after having passed the wheel, can find an easy exit 
through the end of the cock to the waste, along with that from the narrow 
pipe a, already referred to. The latter, by being thin and crooked, offers as 
much resistance to the passage of the water as does the whole line, with the 
wheel and stop-cock at the distant end. This corresponds to the ' artificial line ' 




Fig. 69. 
Hydraulic model, duplex telegraphy. 




Plate Y 



Copyright l>y J. H'. IP'hiu' C^ Ct 
THOMAS ALVA EDISON. 



FOUR MESSAGES ON ONE WIRE 213 

ducing condensers as already described in Chapter XIV 
(Fig. 60). He thus perfectly balanced the electrostatic 
charge of the line, and duplex telegraphy at once became 
a commercial success for both land and ocean systems. 

By combining the diplex and duplex systems, Mr. Edison, 
in 1874, constructed the quadruplex, which permits four 
messages to proceed along a wire at the 
same time, two from each end.^ ^o"'" ^^^ ^°^^ 

11 Trr • • Simultaneous 

Adoptmg a totally different principle. Messages. 

Mr. P. B. Delany has brought to prac- 
tical success a synchronous telegraph which had engaged 
the attention of other inventors for many years. An ex- 

in the duplex electrical telegraph. The water-wheel, with the divided current 
flowing about it, is analogous to the ' differential relay ' ; and the stop-cock to 
the ' key,' which in one position allows the passage of the current, and in 
the other affords free egress of the current from the other station to the 
'ground.' The water-pressure in the street main plays the part of the electro- 
motive force in the batteries of the electrical system. The operation of the 
whole as a duplex telegraph will need little explanation. The operator at A 
transmits a signal by opening stop-cock a. Water rushes in from the main ; 
and, since the resistances offered by the two paths are equal, it divides equally 
in flowing around the wheel. Equal currents being thus applied to the oppo- 
site sides of the latter, it remains at rest. Half the current, however,' passes 
through the line, and reaching the receiving-instrument at B, passes around 
the wheel there on one side and out through the stop-cock 3 ; or, if a small part 
passes through the artificial line (and this will always be the case), it goes in 
such a way as to aid, and not to oppose, the movement of the wheel. Thus 
a signal will be received at B which will be interpreted as a dot or a dash ac- 
cording as the time of motion is short or long. Of course, the transmission 
of a signal from ^ to ^ is accomplished in precisely the same way. If both 
stop-cocks are opened at the same moment, it will easily be seen that the two 
equal opposing currents in the line will prevent any actual flow, and at each 
end flow will take place only into the artificial line, and signals will be recorded 
at both. It is also clear that if the operator at B, wishing to send a dash 
when bnly a dot is to be transmitted from A, shall continue to hold his key 
open after the other is closed, the balance will be at once established at B, the 
wheel will cease to move, and a dot will be recorded ; while the current from 
B, now flowing through the line, will maintain the motion at A until a dash is 
registered there." 

1 This and much similar apparatus is described and illustrated in many stan- 
dard works, among which may be named AiJiericaji Telegraphy, by William 
Maver, Jr. New York, William Maver & Co. 



214 MULTIPLEX TELEGRAPHY 

pert telegrapher can make at the most but ten pulsations 
per second with his key ; a good aerial line of moderate 
length can convey forty to fifty times as many. For sim- 
plicity's sake let us suppose that the Delany system em- 
ploys four operators at each end of a wire, and that the 
four we shall observe at one terminal are all sending mes- 
sages. The instrument of each is electrically connected by 
a trailer to a quadrant of a metalHc wheel, A, each instru- 
ment affecting no other than its own particular and insu- 
lated quadrant. The wheel rotates twenty times a second, 
let us say, so that even while a single dot is being formed 
by an operator the wheel has spun round a full circle (Fig. 
70). At the receiving-station is a similar wheel, B, which 
is rotated at precisely the same rate as its fellow, A. When 

A B 



Fig. 70. 
Delany synchronous telegraph. 



a key at A is on quadrant ai, a. trailer at B will send a 
current through di to a telegraphic sounder, and so with 
the other three quadrants. In effect the wire has been 
divided into four parts, and four independent messages 
take their way through it at the same time. Indeed, it is 
easy to employ for each operator, not a quadrant, but an 
arc of 30° in the circle traversed by the wheel, so that 
twelve despatches instead of four may course over the wire 
simultaneously. Mr. Delany's success in this ingenious 
telegraph consists in the use of correcting impulses, sent 
automatically into the line, so as to keep the trailers in 
strict step one with the other. His system is extensively 
adopted in Great Britain. 



CHAPTER XVI 

WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY 

THUS far we have directed our attention to modes of 
telegraphy which depend upon conduction, upon the 
conveyance of a current by an unbroken metallic wire 
suspended or laid between two stations. 
In a series of experiments interesting what may foUow 
enough, but barren of utility, the water "p°" induction, 
of a canal, river, or bay has often served 
as a conductor for the telegraph. Among the electricians 
who have thus impressed water into their service was Pro- 
fessor Morse. In 1842 he sent a few signals across the 
channel from Castle Garden, New York, to Governor's 
Island, a distance of a mile. With much better results, he 
sent messages, later in the same year, from one side of the 
canal at Washington to the other, a distance of eighty feet, 
employing large copper plates at each terminal. The 
enormous current required to overcome the resistance of 
water has barred this method from practical adoption. 

We pass, therefore, to electrical communication as ef- 
fected by induction — the influence which one conductor 
exerts on another through an intervening insulator. At 
the outset we shall do well to bear in mind that magnetic 
phenomena, which are so closely akin to electrical, are 
always inductive. To observe a common example of mag- 
netic induction, we have only to move a horseshoe magnet 

215 



2i6 WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY 

in the vicinity of a compass needle, which will instantly 
sway about as if blown hither and thither by a sharp 
draught of air. This action takes place if a slate, a pane of 
glass, or a shingle is interposed between the needle and its 
perturber. There is no known insulator for magnetism, 
and as induction of this kind exerts itself perceptibly for 
many yards when large masses of iron are polarised, the 
derangement of compasses at sea from moving iron objects 
aboard ship, or from ferric ores underlying a sea-coast, is a 
constant peril to the mariner. 

Electrical conductors behave much like magnetic masses. 
A current conveyed by a conductor induces a counter-cur- 
rent in all surrounding bodies, and in a degree proportioned 
to their conductive power. This effect is, of course, great- 
est upon the bodies nearest at hand, and we have already 
remarked its serious retarding effect in ocean telegraphy. 
When the original current is of high intensity, it can induce 
a perceptible current in another wire at a distance of sev- 
eral miles. In 1842 Henry remarked that electric waves 
had this quality, but in that early day of electrical inter- 
pretation the full significance of the fact eluded him. In 
the top room of his house he produced a spark an inch 
long, which induced currents in wires stretched in his cellar, 
through two thick floors and two rooms which came between. 
Induction of this sort causes the annoyance, familiar in 
single telephonic circuits, of being obliged to overhear other 
subscribers, whose wires are often far away from our own. 

The first practical use of induced currents in telegraphy 

was when Mr. Edison, in 1885, enabled the trains on a line 

of the Staten Island Railroad to be kept 

Telegraphy to a in coustaut Communication with a tele- 

Moving Tram. graphic wire, suspended in the ordinary 

way beside the track. The roof of a car 

was of insulated metal, and every tap of an operator's key 

within the walls electrified the roof just long enough to 



ACROSS THE BRISTOL CHANNEL 217 

induce a brief pulse through the telegraphic circuit. In 
sending a message to the car this wire was, moment by 
moment, electrified, inducing a response first in the car 
roof, and next in the " sounder " beneath it. This remark- 
able apparatus, afterward used on the Lehigh Valley Rail- 
road, was discontinued from lack of commercial support, 
although it would seem to be advantageous to maintain 
such a service on other than commercial grounds. In case 
of chance obstructions on the track, or other peril, to be 
able to communicate at any moment with a train as it 
speeds along might mean safety instead of disaster. The 
chief item in the cost of this system is the large outlay for 
a special telegraphic wire. 

The next electrician to employ induced currents in teleg- 
raphy was Mr. (now Sir) William H. Preece, the engineer 
then at the head of the British telegraph 
system. Let one example of his work ^he Preece induction 
be cited. In 1896 a cable was laid be- Method, 

tween Lavernock, near Cardiff, on the 
Bristol Channel, and Flat Holme, an island three and a third 
miles off. As the channel at this point is a much-frequented 
route and anchor-ground, the cable was broken again and 
again. As a substitute for it Mr. Preece, in 1898, strung 
wires along the opposite shores, and found that an electric 
pulse sent through one wire instantly made itself heard in 
a telephone connected with the other. It would seem that 
in this etheric form of telegraphy the two opposite lines of 
wire must be each as long as the distance which separates 
them ; therefore, to communicate across the English Chan- 
nel from Dover to Calais would require a line along each 
coast at least twenty miles in length. Where such lines 
exist for ordinary telegraphy, they might easily lend them- 
selves to the Preece system of signalling in case a sub- 
marine cable were to part. 

Marconi, adopting electrostatic instead of electromag- 



2i8 WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY 

netic waves, has won striking results. Let us note the chief 
of his forerunners, as they prepared the way for him. In 
1864 Maxwell observed that electricity 
'^^Sy^tem°"* ^^^ light have the same velocity, 186,400 

miles a second, and he formulated the 
theory that electricity propagates itself in waves which differ 
from those of light only in being longer. This was proved 
to be true by Hertz, in 1888, who showed that where al- 
ternating currents of very high frequency were set up in an 
open circuit, the energy might be conveyed entirely away 
from the circuit into the surrounding space as electric 
waves. His detector was a nearly closed circle of wire, the 
ends being soldered to metal balls almost in contact. With 
this simple apparatus he demonstrated that electric waves 
move with the speed of light, and that they can be reflected 
and refracted precisely as if they formed a visible beam 
At a certain intensity of strain the air insulation broke 
down, and the air became a conductor. This phenomenon 
of passing quite suddenly from a non-conductive to a con- 
ductive state is, as we shall duly see, also to be noted when 
air or other gases are exposed to the X ray. 

Now for the efTect of electric waves such as Hertz pro- 
duced, when they impinge upon substances reduced to 
powder or filings. Conductors, such as the metals, are of 
inestimable service to the electrician; of equal value are 
non-conductors, such as glass and gutta-percha, as they 
strictly fence in an electric stream. A third and remark- 
able vista opens to experiment when it deals with sub- 
stances which, in their normal state, are non- conductive, 
but which, agitated by an electric wave, instantly become 
conductive in a high degree. As long ago as 1866 Mr. S. 
A. Varley noticed that black lead, reduced to a loose dust, 
effectually intercepted a current from fifty Daniell cells, 
although the battery poles were very near each other. 
When he increased the electric tension four- to sixfold, the 



INSTANT CHANGES OF QUALITY 219 

black-lead particles at once compacted themselves so as to 
form a bridge of excellent conductivity. On this principle 
he invented a lightning-protector for electrical instruments, 
the incoming flash causing a tiny heap of carbon dust to 
jirovide it with a path through which it could safely pass 
to the earth. Professor Temistocle Calzecchi Onesti of 
Fermo, in 1885, in an independent series of researches, dis- 
covered that a mass of powdered copper is a non-conductor 
until an electric wave beats upon it ; then, in an instant, 
the mass resolves itself into a conductor almost as efficient 
as if it were a stout, unbroken wire. Professor Edouard 
Branly of Paris, in 1891, on this principle devised a coherer, 
which passed from resistance to invitation when subjected 
to an electric impulse from afar. He enhanced the value of 
his device by the vital discovery that the conductivity be- 
stowed upon filings by electric discharges could be destroyed 
by simply shaking or tapping them_ apart. 

In a homely way the principle of the coherer is often 
illustrated in ordinary telegraphic practice. An operator 
notices that his instrument is not working well, and he sus- 
pects that at some point in his circuit there is a defective 
contact. A little dirt, or oxide, or dampness, has come in 
between two metallic surfaces ; to be sure, they still touch 
each other, but not in the firm and perfect way demanded 
for his work. Accordingly he sends a powerful current 
abruptly into the line, which clears its path thoroughly, 
brushes aside dirt, oxide, or moisture, and the circuit once 
more is as it should be. In all likelihood, the coherer is 
acted upon in the same way. Among the physicists who 
studied it in its original form was Dr. Oliver J. Lodge. He 
improved it so much that, in 1894, at the Royal Institution 
in London, he was able to show it as an electric eye that 
registered the impact of invisible rays at a distance of more 
than forty yards. He made bold to say that this distance 
might be raised to half a mile. 



220 



WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY 



As early as 1879 Professor D. E. Hughes began a series 
of experiments in wireless telegraphy, on much the lines 
which in other hands have now reached commercial as well 
as scientific success. Professor Hughes was the inventor of 
the microphone, and that instrument, he declared, affords 
an unrivalled means of receiving wireless messages, since 
it requires no tapping to restore its non-conductivity. In 
his researches this investigator was convinced that his sig- 
nals were propagated, not by electromagnetic induction, 
but by aerial electric waves spreading out from an electric 
spark. Early in 1880 he showed his apparatus to Professor 
Stokes, who observed its operation carefully. His dictum 
was that he saw nothing which could not be explained by 
known electromagnetic effects. This erroneous judgment 
so discouraged Professor Hughes that he desisted from fol- 
lowing up his experiments, and thus, in all probability, the 
birth of the wireless telegraph was for several years de- 
layed.^ 

The coherer, as improved by Marconi, is a glass tube 
about 1 2 inches long and about 1-2 of an inch in internal 
diameter. The electrodes are inserted in this tube so as 
almost to touch ; between them is about 3~o of an inch filled 
with a pinch of the responsive mixture which forms the pivot 




Fig. 71. 

Marconi coherer, enlarged view. 

of the whole contrivance. This mixture is 90 per cent, 
nickel filings, 10 per cent, hard silver filings, and a mere trace 
of mercury ; the tube is exhausted of air to within i-oio 0" part 
(Fig. 71). How does this trifle of metallic dust manage loudly 

1 History of the Wireless Telegraph, by J. J. Fahie. Edinburgh and Lon- 
don, WilHam Blackwood & Sons; New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1899. 
This work is full of interesting detail, well illustrated. 



INSTRUMENTAL DETAILS 



221 



6 



r—M ' 



to utter its signals through a telegraphic sounder, or forcibly 
indent them upon a moving strip of paper? Not directly, 
but indirectly, as the very last refinement of initiation. Let 
us glance at Fig. 72, which shows in the simplest outHnes 
a Marconi apparatus. K * 

is a telegraph-key, which, 
at the transmitting-sta- 
tion, sends a current from 
B, a battery and induction 
coil, to vS and T, two brass 
spheres about three inches 
in diameter, and mounted 
a small distance apart. 
The spark which, during 
the depression of the key 
K, passes between the 
spheres, sends forth the 
electric waves which bear 
the signal afar. C is the 
coherer at the receiving- 
station, mounted with me- 
tallic wings, W and W, to 
catch the electric waves ; 
the coherer at each end is 
joined to the metallic cir- 
cuit of the voltaic cell 
M. In this circuit or 




Fig. 72. 
Marconi telegraph apparatus. 



chain, the coherer, when unexcited, forms a link which 
obstructs the flow of a current eager to leap across. The 
instant that an electric wave from the sending-station im- 
pinges upon the coherer it becomes conductive ; the cur- 
rent instantly glides through it, and at the same time a 
current, by means of a relay, is sent through the powerful 
voltaic battery N, so as to announce the signal through an 
ordinary telegraphic receiver. 



222 WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY 

An electric impulse, almost too attenuated for computa- 
tion, is here able to effect such a change in a pinch of dust 
that it becomes a free avenue instead of a barricade. Through 
that avenue a powerful blow from a local store of energy 
makes itself heard and felt. No device of the trigger class is 
comparable with this in delicacy. An instant after a signal 
has taken its way through the coherer a small hammer strikes 
the tiny tube, jarring its particles asunder, so that they re- 
sume their normal state of high resistance. We may well be 
astonished at the sensitiveness of the metallic filings to an 
electric wave originating many miles away, but let us remem- 
ber how clearly the eye can see a bright lamp at the same 
distance as it sheds a sister beam. Thus far no substance 
has been discovered with a mechanical responsiveness to so 
feeble a ray of light; in the world of nature and art the 
coherer stands alone. The electric waves employed by 
Marconi are about four feet long, or have a frequency of 
about 250,000,000 per second. Such undulations pass 
readily through brick or stone walls, through common 
roofs and floors — indeed, through all substances which 
are non-conductive to electric waves of ordinary length. 
Were the energy of a Marconi sending-instrument applied 
to an arc-lamp, it would generate a beam of a thousand 
candle-power. We have thus a means of comparing the 
sensitiveness of the retina to light with the responsiveness 
of the Marconi coherer to electric waves, after both radia- 
tions have undergone a journey of miles. 

An essential feature of this method of etheric telegraphy, 
due to Marconi himself, is the suspension of a perpendicular 
wire at each terminus, its length twenty feet for stations 
a mile apart, forty feet for four miles, and so on, the tele- 
graphic distance increasing as the square of the length of 
suspended wire. In the Kingstown regatta, July, 1898, 
Marconi sent from a yacht under full steam a report to 
the shore without the loss of a moment from start to finish. 



LIGHT AND SOUND DISMISSED 223 

This feat was repeated during the protracted contest be- 
tween the Cohnnbia and the Shamrock yachts in New 
York Bay, October, 1899. On March 28, 1899, Marconi 
signals put Wimereux, two miles north of Boulogne, in 
communication with the South Foreland Lighthouse, thirty- 
two miles off.^ In August, 1899, during the manoeuvres of 
the British navy, similar messages were sent as far as 
eighty miles. It was clearly demonstrated that a new 
power had been placed in the hands of a naval commander. 
" A touch on a button in a flagship is all that is now 
needed to initiate every tactical evolution in a fleet, and 
insure an almost automatic precision in the resulting move- 
ments of the ships. The flashing lantern is superseded at 
night, flags and the semaphore by day, or, if these are re- 
tained, it is for services purely auxiliary. The hideous 
and bewildering shrieks of the steam-siren need no longer 
be heard in a fog, and the uncertain system of gun signals 
will soon become a thing of the past/' The interest of the 
naval and military strategist in the Marconi apparatus ex- 
tends far beyond its communication of inteUigence, Any 

1 The value of wireless telegraphy in relation to disasters at sea was proved 
in a remarkable way yesterday morning. While the Channel was enveloped 
in a dense fog, which had lasted throughout the greater part of the night, the 
East Goodwin Light-ship had a very narrow escape from sinking at her 
moorings by being run into by the steamship R. F. Matthews, 1964 tons gross 
burden, of London, outward bound from the Thames. The East Goodwin 
Light-ship is one of four such vessels marking the Goodwin Sands, and, curi- 
ously enough, it happens to be the one ship which has been fitted with Signor 
Marconi's installation for wireless telegraphy. The vessel was moored about 
twelve miles to the northeast of the South Foreland Lighthouse (where there is 
another wireless-telegraphy installation), and she is about ten miles from the 
shore, being directly opposite Deal. The information regarding the collision 
was at once communicated by wireless telegraphy from the disabled light-ship 
to the South Foreland Lighthouse, where Mr. Bullock, assistant to Signor 
Marconi, received the following message • " We have just been run into by the 
steamer R. F. Matthews of London. Steamship is standing by us. Our bows 
very badly damaged." Mr. Bullock immediately forwarded this information 
to the Trinity House authorities at Ramsgate. — T^/w^j, April 29, 1899. 



224 WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY 

electrical appliance whatever may be set in motion by the 
same wave that actuates a telegraphic sounder. A fuse 
may be ignited, or a motor started and directed, by appara- 
tus connected with the coherer, for all its minuteness. Mr. 
Walter Jamieson and Mr. John Trotter have devised means 
for the direction of torpedoes by ether waves, such as those 
set at work in the wireless telegraph. Two rods projecting 
above the surface of the water receive the waves, and are 
in circuit with a coherer and a relay."" At the will of the 
distant operator a solenoid draws in an iron core either to 
the right or to the left, moving the helm accordingly. 

As the news of the success of the Marconi telegraph 
made its way to the London Stock Exchange there was a 
fall in the shares of cable companies. The fear of rivalry 
from the new invention was baseless. As but 15 words 
a minute are transmissible by the Marconi system, it evi- 
dently does not compete with a cable, such as that between 
France and England, which can transmit 2500 words a 
minute without difficulty. The Marconi telegraph comes 
less as a competitor to old systems than as a mode of 
communication which creates a field of its own. We have 
seen what it may accomplish in war, far outdoing any feat 
possible to any other apparatus, acoustic, luminous, or elec- 
trical. In quite as striking fashion does it break new 
ground in the service of commerce and trade. It enables 
lighthouses continually to spell their names, so that re- 
ceivers aboard ship may give the steersmen their bearings 
even in storm and fog. In the crowded condition of the 
steamship " lanes " which cross the Atlantic, a priceless 
security against colHsion is afforded the man at the helm. 
On November 15, 1899, Marconi telegraphed from the 
American liner 5/. Paul to the Needles, sixty-six nautical 
miles away. In many cases the telegraphic business to an 
island is too small to warrant the laying of a cable ; hence 
we find that Trinidad and Tobago are to be joined by the 



THROUGH A CORNER 225 

wireless system, as also five islands of the Hawaiian group, 
eight to sixty-one miles apart. 

A weak point in the first Marconi apparatus was that any- 
body within the working radius of the sending-instrument 
could read its message. To modify this objection secret 
codes were at times employed, as in commerce and diplo- 
macy. A complete deliverance from this difficulty is prom- 
ised in attuning a transmitter and a receiver to the same 
note, so that one receiver, and no other, shall respond to a 
particular frequency of impulses. The experiments which 
indicate success in this vital particular have been conducted 
by Professor Lodge. 

When electricians, twenty years ago, committed energy 
to a wire and thus enabled it to go round a corner, they 
felt thart they had done well. The Hertz waves sent 
abroad by Marconi ask no wire, as they find their way, not 
round a corner, but through a corner. On May i, 1899, ^ 
party of French officers on board the Idis at Sangatte, near 
Calais, spoke to Wimereux by means of a Marconi appara- 
tus, with Cape Grisnez, a lofty promontory, intervening. In 
ascertaining how much the earth and the sea may obstruct 
the waves of Hertz there is a broad and fruitful field for in- 
vestigation. " It may be," says Professor John Trowbridge, 
**that such long electrical waves roll around the surface 
of such obstructions very much as waves of sound and of 
water would do." 

It is singular how discoveries sometimes arrive abreast 
of each other so as to render mutual aid, or supply a press- 
ing want almost as 

soon as it is felt. The -^aAAA/^^^ -*aAA/\Aa/" 

coherer in its present -p 

form is actuated by Discontinuous electric waves, 

waves of compara- 
tively low frequency, which rise from zero to full height in 
extremely brief periods, and are separated by periods de- 



226 



WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY 




Fig. 74. 
Wehnelt interrupter. 



cidedly longer (Fig. 73). What is needed is a plan by which 
the waves may flow either continuously or so near together 
that they may lend themselves to attuning. Dr. Wehnelt, by 
an extraordinary discovery, may, in all likelihood, provide 
the lacking device in the form of his inter- 
rupter, which breaks an electric circuit as 
often as two thousand times a second. 
The means for this amazing performance 
are simplicity itself (Fig. 74). A jar, a, 
containing a solution of sulphuric acid has 
two electrodes immersed in it; one of them 
is a lead plate of large surface, b ; the othe'r 
is a small platinum wire which protrudes 
from a glass tube, d. A current passing 
through the cell between the two metals 
at c is interrupted, in ordinary cases five hundred times a 
second, and in extreme cases four times as often, by bub- 
bles of gas given off from the wire instant by instant.^ 

The adoption of electricity in its diverse phases, in lieu 
of visible signals as a communicator of intelligence, is one 
of the distinctive leaps of human prog- 
The Grasp of Eiec- rcss. A hundred years ago the Chappe 
trie Telegraphy. telegraph could transmit per minute 
but three signals between one station 
and another, for a distance of ten miles. To-day a single 
wire joining Paris and Toulon, 475 miles apart, can easily 
bear 6000 signals a minute, and this in perfect indepen- 
dence of daylight or good weather. Because a metallic 
wire can thus carry many more messages than one opera- 



1 This curious contrivance affords a ready means of producing the sparks 
needed for gas-engines ; it is the simplest means of converting a continuous 
into an alternating current, and hence offers notable service to jewellers and 
other artisans who wish a welding current of small volume. In radiography 
it has reduced the time of exposure by as much as three fourths, besides giving 
remarkably steady images on the fluorescent screen. — Electrical World and 
Engineer, May 20, 1899. 



GRASP OF ELECTRIC TELEGRAPHY 227 

tor can transmit, we find in the field a wide variety of 
multiple systems of telegraphy, none of them possible 
before the electric age. In the harmonic method the wire 
becomes in effect a medium for the conveyance of musical 
tones, each of them unheard except through a sympathetic 
reed. In a second plan the dual polarity of an electric 
current enables it to carry two messages as clearly as one. 
In yet another mode a response is given only to an impulse 
of more than ordinary force, as if the instrument slept 
under any knock but a heavy one. By another and totally 
different scheme the current is so subdivided that a dozen 
despatches may be borne abreast, this by the synchronous 
rotation at high speed of two wheels hundreds of miles 
apart. As the latest and perhaps the last term in the 
series, we have a telegraph which dispenses with connect- 
ing wires altogether, and takes its way like a pencil of 
light through the ether of space. All these methods, 
diverse as they are, have one limitation — their messages 
must take the form of an arbitrary code of signals. '* A " 
must be a short tap and a long one, and so on throughout 
the alphabet. It remained for the telephone to banish this 
one restriction, and so marry sound and electricity that a 
metallic thread carries electrical pulses which are virtually 
those of every tone and cadence of the human voice. 



CHAPTER XVII 

THE TELEPHONE 

IN the history of invention it has often appeared that a 
feat has been really much more simple than it seemed 
to be at first view. More than one good engineer at the 
inception of railroading thought that the 
From Complexity to ^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^ whcels must be toothed if 
Simplicity. they wcrc to be trusted around sharp 

curves and up steep gradients. And so 
it was with the problem of telephony. Its pioneers saw 
looming between the domain of electricity and the world 
of sound nothing short of a mountain of difficulty. As 
they ascended its heights they beheld at its very base a 
straight and easy mode of translating the pulses of the 
voice into equal throbs of electricity. 

The first explorer here was Dr. Page. In 1837 he no- 
ticed that a musical sound issued from the core of an 
electromagnet whenever contact was made or broken be- 
tween its coil and a battery.^ His experiments were 
repeated and extended by many inquirers at home and 
abroad, who saw a prospect of thus transmitting music by 
telegraph not less easily than the dots and dashes of a 
common message. Of these men the most notable was 
Johann Philipp Reis of Friedrichsdorf, in Germany. In 

1 American Joicrnal of Science. First series, Vol. XXXII, p. 369, and 
Vol. XXXIII, p. 354. 

228 



AN INHERITED INTEREST 229 

186 1 he devised an electrical instrument which transmitted 
not only music but also vowel sounds, although not in a 
sufficiently clear and reliable way to be accounted a suc- 
cess. The goal which Reis so narrowly missed took on a 
new accessibility when Helmholtz completed his masterly 
analysis of vowel sounds. With nothing more than a hol- 
low^ sphere he resolved a, e, i, o, and u into their constituent 
musical elements, much as Newton with a simple prism had 
divided a beam of white light into its component coloured 
rays. Armed with a series of tuning-forks, actuated by 
electricity, he proceeded to prove his analysis true. Unit- 
ing a series of fundamental tones, he reproduced the vowels 
with unmistakable clearness. 

The possibility that articulate speech might be committed 
to an electric wire and recovered from it now plainly pic- 
tured itself in the imagination of three great inventors — 
Elisha Gray, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Alva 
Edison. Inasmuch as Bell, by his fortunate choice of an 
undulatory current, has given the world the best instru- 
ment, it may be sufficient to confine attention to the steps 
by which he arrived at his victory. The original impulse 
in his work came from his distinguished father. Professor 
Alexander Melville Bell, whose life has been devoted to a 
critical study of articulate speech, and who has invented 
for articulate sounds an alphabet of forty-four symbols, 
which is known as ''visible speech." This veteran of 
science, writing from his residence in Washington, gives 
us, under the date of November 14, 1899, this noteworthy 
account of the incitements which ended in the telephone : 
" In the boyhood of my three sons I took them to see the 
speaking-machine constructed by Herr Faber, and we were 
all greatly interested in it professionally. To test their 
theoretical knowledge, and their mechanical ingenuity, I 
offered a prize to the one who should produce the best 
results in imitation of speech by mechanical means. All, 



230 THE TELEPHONE 

of course, set to work, but nothing of startling novelty was 
devised. The scheme of my second son, A. G. Bell, was, 
however, the best. This contest — as well as the whole course 
of the boys' education — directed their minds to the subject, 
until the sole survivor of the lads came to the conclusion 
that imitative mechanism might be dispensed with, and 
merely the vibrations of speech be transmitted to an elec- 
tric wire. This was entirely his own idea. He illustrated 
it to me by diagrams, and sketched out the whole plan of 
central-office communication, long before anything had been 
done for the practical realisation of the idea. I can claim 
nothing in the telephone but the impulse which led to the 
invention." 

Soon after the telephone had proved itself to be thor- 
oughly successful, its inventor was invited to deliver a 
lecture, on October 31, 1877, before the Society of Tele- 
graph Engineers, in London. He said : 

When we sing into a piano, certain of the strings of the instru- 
ment are set in vibration sympathetically by the action of the 
voice with different degrees of amplitude, and a sound, which is 
an approximation to the vowel uttered, is produced from the 
piano. Theory shows that, had a piano a very much larger num- 
ber of strings to the octave, the vowel sounds would be perfectly 
reproduced. My idea was to use a harp-Hke apparatus, and 
throw certain of the rods into vibration by sounds of different 
amplitudes. At the other end of the circuit the corresponding 
rods of a second harp would vibrate with their proper relations of 
force, and the timbre of the sound would be reproduced. The 
expense of constructing the apparatus deterred me from making 
the attempt, and I sought to simplify the apparatus before having 
it made.i 

As the result of a long series of experiments, he discov- 
ered that the complexity of the diverse rods of a harp was 
quite unnecessary ; a piece of clock-spring, about the size 
and shape of his thumb-nail, glued to the centre of a mem- 
brane of gold-beaters' skin, was adequate to receiving every 
1 The Speaking Telephone, by G. B. Prescott. New York, Appleton, 1878. 



AT PHILADELPHIA IN 1876 231 

tone of the voice, while a second apparatus of identical 
simplicity repeated the words at the distant end of a wire. 
It took a long and roundabout search to find that the best 
path for the electric transmission of speech is the short and 
direct course of talking to one simple disc and listening at 
another. 

When Professor Bell exhibited his telephone at Philadel- 
phia, in 1876, nothing seemed less probable than that he 
had entered upon a serious rivalry with 
the telegraph. The tones of the little disc a carbon Button Re- 
were lisping and feeble ; it was sometimes »nforces sound, 
hard to convince its auditors that they 
were hearing anything else than sounds which had set up 
no partnership with electricity, and were pulsing through 
the wire precisely as they might through the string of that 
common acoustic 



toy, the lovers' tele- 
graph (Fig. 75). The 
week-day noises of Fig. 75. 

the Exhibition build- Lovers' telegraph. Two bits of tubing have 

1 , 1 each an end closed by a membrane ; between 

mg- SO completely ^, ^ .. \ . 

^ jr y the centres of the membranes a strmg conveys 

drowned its tones speech for several hundred feet. 

that only with Sab- 
bath quiet were its messages distinct to the ear. At first 
Professor Bell used the same instrument in speaking and in 
listening. To-day the instrument into which one speaks, the 
transmitter, differs in essential details from the receiver at 
which one hstens. The telephone as it left the hands of its 
inventor was nearly perfect in its task of reproducing speech 
from minute currents as they arrived from a distance. For 
the work of transforming the energy of the voice into elec- 
tric pulses the transmitter was imperfect, and could not have 
been a commercial success but for its improvement by 
Hughes, Blake, and Edison. All three added an element 
indispensable in other branches of the electric art, namely, 




232 THE TELEPHONE 

carbon, which here displays a property of the utmost 
value. 

The electrical resistance of a small mass of carbon re- 
sponds in the most sensitive way to the slightest variation 
in the mechanical pressure to which it may be exposed 
(Fig. "jS). Mount a small upright stick of carbon on pivots, 
which it lightly touches, send an electric current through 
it, and a feather stroke upon the car- 

Ebon so lifts and lowers its resistance 
that in a connected telephone one 
hears a succession of loud raps. It 
must not be supposed that these 
raps are the magnified sounds of the 
y.. , feather as it moves along. They 

would be heard just as distinctly if 
the feather and the carbon were inclosed in a vacuum and so 
cushioned as in themselves to be perfectly silent. It is the 
changing resistance of the stick that gives rise to the sounds, 
a phenomenon which reappears, as we shall presently ob- 
serve, in the photophone. In the improved forms of tele- 
phone a carbon button is placed in a local electric circuit, 
and under the slight variations of pressure exerted by the 
sound-waves of speech this button undergoes wide fluctua- 
tions in its electric resistance, so that electric pulses much 
intensified are sent into the line. In its original form the 
telephone did little else than utter an uneven whisper, and 
Professor Bell intended to use it solely in lecture-room illus- 
trations. A sphere of commercial acceptance as wide as the 
world followed the moment that the carbon microphone 
brought a muffled lisp to full and clear audibility. 

Two magnetic telephones of rough-and-ready manufac- 
ture, with a hundred feet of wire, may be made wholesale 
for a dollar ; yet in their simplicity of construction, united 
to complexity of working, they are among the most re- 
markable creations of the age. Fig. J J shows the anatomy 



ITS ANATOMY 233 

of such instruments. D is the thin iron disc against which 
one speaks as it all but touches P, the pole of the permanent 
steel magnet contained in the case M. As the disc is 
urged and withdrawn by the pulses of the voice it comes 
into fluctuating degrees of approach to P\ this causes the 




Fig. 77. 
Telephone dissected. 

magnetism of P to vary in sympathy. Whenever a magnet 
inclosed in a coil of wire, C, thus varies in strength, minute 
currents, of electricity are created in the coil; such currents 
accordingly pass to the line-wires, W, W. The electric 
undulations arrive at a receiving-instrument which, for 
simplicity's sake, we shall assume to be identical with the 
sending-apparatus. They circulate round a steel magnet 
whose attractive power upon a disc they modify from in- 
stant to instant. Because the receiving-disc in this indirect 
manner thus vibrates in sympathy with the transmitting- 
disc, the speaker's words arrive with characteristic though 
weakened tones at B 



cEMt^ y« 



as sent from A (Fig. 
78). Surely there is 
nothing in electric p^^ g 

art more marvellous Telephonic circuit. 

than this persistence 

of infinitesimal waves in all their sinuosities, through re- 
peated transfer and transformation. That matter may be 
impressed by forces next to nothing in quantity, and that 
these impressions may be transmitted for miles and recov- 



234 THE TELEPHONE 

ered with no loss of character, are among the most wonder- 
ful facts of nature, and as serviceable as they are wonderful. 

The telephone is not simply a rival to the telegraph in 

many fields : it cultivates a vast domain of its own. The 

telegraph suffers from a serious restric- 

simpier than the tiou in that it spcaks a language not 
Telegraph. understood by the people. When we 

send a telegram we must go to a tele- 
graph office in quest of an operator skilled in translating a 
message into the long and short taps of the Morse code of 
signals. We are somewhat in the case of the Neapolitan 
who cannot write, and who must seek a professional scribe 
to assist him in communications, however confidential. 
From this dependence the telephone proclaims emancipa- 
tion ; it strikes a dominant note of modern invention — 
immediacy and simplicity. Ousting the middleman as an 
intruder, it enables anybody who can ring a bell, speak, and 
listen to be master of electric communication. It is as if a 
speaking-tube, efficient and clear, were laid between one's 
house or office and every other in the web that radiates 
from telephonic headquarters. A speaking-tube confines 
to a narrow line the vibrations which without it would agi- 
tate a roomful of air ; hence its carrying power. A telephone 
limits to a narrower line of metal undulations which are 
incomparably more minute ; hence an effectiveness as much 
above that of the tube as the mobility of a molecule exceeds 
that of a mass. 

At long distances the boon of conversation, — of receiving 

an instant reply to a question, has special value. A pajiient 

confers with his'surgeon, a railroad presi- 

Long-distance Tele- dent with his couuscl, an investor with 

phony. j^jg broker, as if they stood face to face. 

Because of this new facility the railroads 

between New York and Chicago are suffering a noteworthy 

loss of business ; their rapid trains are less in request than 



VERSATILITY 235 

formerly. Principals and agents, clients and attorneys, now 
find it unnecessary to travel a thousand miles that their 
voices may be accompanied by themselves. Experiments 
of promise have been made in relaying the telephone, so 
that, as in the case of the telegraph, a message may be sent 
to an indefinitely great distance by means of local currents 
brought here and there into the line. The human voice 
may yet belt the earth, and this before many years are 
pasto 

It has been found possible to send several telephonic 
messages simultaneously over the same wire, either in one 
direction, or in opposite directions. Should these experi- 
ments issue in commercial success the telegraph will find its 
rival formidable indeed. In the hands of Dr. Lodge the 
telephone has been refined to thirtyfold its ordinary sensi- 
tiveness, in which form it is an unapproached means of 
revealing minute electric currents. To pass to the other 
extreme of telephonic capacity, Edison, in constructing his 
megaphone, enables an assembly of a thousand persons 
to hear an oration, an orchestra, or a chorus borne upon 
electric waves for a distance of a hundred miles and more. 
In services of a more ever3/-day kind let us mark the good 
offices of the ordinary instrument. 

The acute responsiveness of the ordinary telephone at 
first seemed a serious barrier to its use for long distances. 
In a range of miles its wire was liable to come into the 
neighbourhood of telegraphic, lighting, or power circuits, 
whose pulsations it reported all too faithfully. The diffi- 
culty lay in balancing each disturbance by an equal and 
opposite disturbance, which problem, a little at a time, 
has been duly solved. The first improvement was in mak- 
ing each line double, so as to discard the '* earth," borrowed 
from telegraphy, as the return half of the circuit. This 
greatly reduced many perturbing influences, and barred out 
others completely. Another and more decided betterment 



236 THE TELEPHONE 

lay in making the two wires of a circuit cross each other, 
without touching, at every mile the upper wire exchanging 
its place with the lower wire. This plan provides effectual 
compensation for inductive intrusions,leaving to the engineer 
the simple question of furnishing better metallic conductors. 
This he has done, first, by using hard drawn copper wire 
instead of iron, and next, by employing this in a size which 
at the end of 1899 had reached .165 of an inch. Among 
the cities most distant from each other which, on December 
31, 1899, were in telephonic communication were San Fran- 
cisco and Boise City, 1309 miles apart; Boston and Mont- 
gomery, 1538 miles; Boston and Omaha, 1556; Seattle and 
San Diego, 1567; Boston and Kansas City, 1609; Boston 
and Duluth, 1652 ; and Boston and Little Rock, 1793 miles. 
In this last case the two wires which form the circuit weigh 
in all no less than 780 tons ; this huge mass is to be ex- 
ceeded by that of the line, 1859 miles in length, soon to 
connect New York with New Orleans. 

Whether for distances long or short, the telephone confers 
something Hke ubiquity upon the human voice. Physicians 
are summoned in emergency without the 
Manifold New Benefits. Jqss of a moment ; from ouc's arm-chair 
a lawyer or a banker may be consulted 
as readily as by a formal visit; a manufacturer from his 
down-town office gives orders to his foreman in a distant 
suburb ; housekeepers go to market every morning with- 
out taking off their slippers ; and merchants dispose of their 
wares without the costly travel previously required. In the 
first critical minute of a fire an alarm reaches headquarters, 
and when an accident happens on a trolley line help is 
forthwith despatched from the nearest station. In the police 
departments of American cities the telephone has unique 
value, especially when foreigners on the force are not too 
familiar with English spoken or written. In such cases 
needed explanations can be given, and, what is of equal 



VOCAL UBIQUITY 237 

consequence, a speaker may be identified by his voice as 
the officer authorised to command. 

By its means the chief at headquarters is in touch with 
every member of the force at times of uncommon peril. 
When a great hoHday parade is to be escorted with safety 
to the hosts of spectators who press almost beneath the 
feet of its horses, when a riotous mob is to be headed ofT 
and dispersed, when an explosion or a hurricane involves a 
city in disaster, the telephone gives a control much more 
constant and direct than is possible to the telegraph. In 
many situations the telephone enters where the speaking- 
tube has no ad;nittance and the telegraph-wire is scarcely 
feasible. In compressed-air caissons and diving work the 
fluctuations of pressure and the need for perfect flexibility 
bar out a rigid tube, as well as the telegraph instrument 
with its liabiHty to harm. In mines the distances are 
usually too long for tubing, and noises assail even short 
lengths of pipe with confusing efifect. In cold-storage 
warehouses another difficulty is confronted, as the con- 
densation of moisture inside a pipe may render it worthless. 
A telephonic wire in all these circumstances comes in with 
perfect flexibility, with imperviousness to sound, with in- 
difiference to pressure, and a trifling cost. Even within 
what at first seemed an unassailable stronghold, the speak- 
ing-tube is being supplanted. In a factory the desks of the 
chiefs of departments are now being united by telephones 
with the head office ; so, too, in great warehouses, stores, and 
hotels. In the largest new office buildings, all the tenants 
are in telephonic communication with the superintendent 
and with one another. 

As a rule a telephone exchange is nothing more than 
a passive agent, resting content with responding to Mr. 
Brown's request that he be put in communication with Mr. 
Smith. But the exchange may perform other duties than 
these. A subscriber may be called up at any hour in the 



238 THE TELEPHONE 

morning he wishes ; in case of a fire in or near his business 
premises he may be duly warned. Among the singular 
examples of this kind of aid may be mentioned the arousal 
of subscribers desirous of witnessing the meteors expected 
every autumn in November. Their appearance is some- 
what irregular, so that a single watcher of the skies replaces 
the thousand throughout a great metropolis who might 
otherwise waste their time. 

Sometimes lines of metal laid for a very different purpose 
lend themselves to telephony as well as if they had been 
designed for nothing else. Barbed-wire fences not only 
mark the bounds of a Kansas farm, or an Australian cattle- 
run, but furnish admirable telephonic circuits. ^ In this they 
are beginning to ameliorate the isolation of country life. 
When roads are heavy, or impassable, and indeed at all 
times, a neighbourly word of greeting and gossip is more 
cheery than any written communications can ever be. 

The telephone, despite all attempts to provide it, still 
lacks a simple and trustworthy record ; the hopes built 
upon the phonograph in this regard remain unfulfilled. 
This is why the ticker, which prints the news in thousands 
of American offices and clubs, has never been ousted by 
the Budapest plan of a continuous news service by tele- 
phone. In circumstances where the telegraph is debarred 

1 Liberal, Kansas, is a centre of such improvised means of communication. 
Mr. George S. Smith writes thence, July 4, 1899: " The use of the common 
wire fence as a conductor is sufficient on short lines of ten to fifteen miles in 
dry weather. The wire carefully connected, no solder is needed. In wet 
weather the fence wire makes a poor connection. "We have a line thirty-five 
miles long, using the fence in place of poles, driving the nail through the in^ 
sulator into the top of the post. This makes a good line at small expense." 

A rural telephone service is far advanced in northeastern Ohio, and particu- 
larly in Geauga County, which is strictly an agricultural county. Not only is 
there an office in every township, but hundreds of farmers have telephones in 
their homes. One of the companies, the Bainbridge, is strictly a farmers' 
company, it being operated by eight farmers, who own everything from fran- 
chise to switchboard. The primary object in constructing the lines was not 




Pl.ATK \ [ 



CHINESE ti<:lephone substation. 

Pacific Telephone and Telegrapli Co., San Francisco. 



INDISPENSABLE TO THE CHINESE 239 

from the direct conveyance of word-symbols, the telephone 
enters with peculiar value. Until Professor Bell perfected 
this invention a Chinaman was denied by 
the structure of his language any im- a Godsend to the 
mediate transmission of it by electricity- chinaman. 

Chinese has no alphabet, and its written 
signs are so numerous and intricate as to defy reduction to 
a simple telegraphic code. Two methods proffered them- 
selves : first, to translate a Chinese message into an alpha- 
betical tongue, telegraph- this, and at the receiving-station 
run the risk of error in retranslating into Chinese ; second, 
in the original Morse method, giving a number to each word 
in a dictionary, and telegraphing numerals, to be matched 
as received with their appropriate signification. 

With the telephone all this hazard and trouble vanish at 
once. A Chinaman speaks his message ; it is received exactly 
as spoken, either by his correspondent or his correspondent's 
scribe. Mr. Louis Glass, of the Pacific Telephone and Tele- 
graph Company, San Francisco, states that his company 
has a substation in San Francisco, employing three Chinese 
attendants. " Their ejaculatory language gives peculiarly 
good telephonic results. The Chinese do a very large 
long-distance business throughout the whole Pacific coast, 
and apparently with more satisfactory results than English- 
to build them for an investment, but as a help in the transaction of business, 
and to give families some of the social privileges that are too often lacking on 
the farm. A modern lOO-drop switchboard is centrally located in the home 
of one of the company, who, with the help of his family, attends to this work 
very satisfactorily. The rental price of a telephone is only $12 a year in ad- 
vance, or $1.25 by the month, and this entitles the subscriber, his family, 
hired help, and guests to the free use of the lines, and also of those with 
which the company has reciprocity contracts. This company started with 
three subscribers outside its organisers, and now it has more than fifty, with 
thirty miles of poles, and one hundred of wire. The low rental is only made 
possible in the country by placing several telephones in each circuit, usually 
one street or neighbourhood being on the same w'xxQ.—Americati Agriculturist^ 
October 7, 1899. 



240 



THE TELEPHONE 



speaking subscribers " (Plate VI). In British Columbia, the 
Victoria Telephone Company reports a similar success with 
a circle of Chinese subscribers, some fifty in number. 

In New York, Chicago, and other large American cities, 
the telephones used for local circuits are available for long- 
distance operation, so that a subscriber 
Local and Long-dis- from his officc-dcsk or parlor-tablc may 

tance Systems as Com- ,, ., , 1 -i • i 

bined in Sweden. talk a mile or a thousaud miles with 
equal facility. In Stockholm the tele- 
phone service is noteworthy for its cheapness, and for 
its union of a network of communication which extends 
throughout Sweden from the nucleus afforded by the local 
systems of the capital. In Stockholm, with a population 
of 283,000, there were on August 15, 1899, ^^ fewer than 
24,179 subscribers to the three installations. Two of these, 
the AUmanna and the Bell, had 19,020 subscribers; the 
third, which is a government service, had 5159. Accept- 
ing the usual number of a household as being six, we have 
thus a telephone for every two households in the Scandi- 
navian capital. The lowness of charges has had much 
to do with this unexampled popularity of the instrument. 
The Allmanna allows a subscriber to have an independent 
line, and unlimited use of it, for 80 crowns ($21.60) a year. 
If he will share his line with another subscriber, the charge 
falls to 60 crowns ($16.20). The Bell Company serves 
residences solely ; it furnishes each subscriber with an in- 
dependent Hne for 36 crowns ($9.72) a year; for every 
conversation beyond lOO in each quarter a toll of 10 ore 
(2^-0 cents) is levied. 

If a subscriber to the Allmanna Company chooses to pay 
100 crowns ($27) a year, he may converse with the Bell 
subscribers to his heart's content. Without extra payment 
the subscribers to both concerns may talk to 3850 sub- 
scribers in the country surrounding Stockholm for a radius 
of forty-five miles. A country subscriber has privileges 



SWEDEN LEADS THE WORLD 241 

wider still. He is at liberty to talk within a radius of ninety 
miles from home without extra charge. Mr. H. T. Ceder- 
gren of the AUmanna Company, who courteously gives me 
this information, estimated the total number of telephones 
in Sweden in use on August 15, 1899, as about 65,000 for 
a total population of 4,900,000. In establishing a tariff on 
the lowest possible terms, and graduating its charges ac- 
cording to the services rendered, the example of Sweden is 
one that points the way to a popularity for the telephone 
such as it has not had elsewhere in the civilised world. 

Long-distance telephony exerts a rivalry with the tele- 
graph which grows keener month by month, as the net- 
work of arteries for electric speech ex- 
tends farther from North to South, from The Telephone and the 

East to West, so that the question SUg- Telegraph as Rivals. 

gests itself. Will this rivalry gain strength 
in the future? The main advantage of the telegraph is 
that a positive record is on file at each end of the line. 
When one writes a message and leaves it with a telegraph 
clerk his task is at an end ; he need waste no time waiting, 
perhaps nearly an hour, while the line is "busy." The 
telegraph, too, can send news to a hundred or more offices 
at a single sending operation, and with the aid of machinery 
can far outspeed the voice. The strong points of the tele- 
phone, on the other hand, are its simplicity and immediacy, 
from which, however, must be subtracted the disadvantage 
that, contrary to a general rule, the larger a telephonic ex- 
change the more does the installation cost per subscriber. 
In the first place, the average wire is much longer in a great 
city like New York than in Buffalo, a community but one- 
sixth as populous ; and secondly, a switchboard and its 
accessories when doubled in extent demand a more than 
doubled outlay ; while, too, the larger a city the greater is 
the average number of calls per subscriber. In many ways 
a telephone and a telegraph system may supplement each 



242 THE TELFPHONE 

other most usefully. A message of only ordinary impor- 
tance may be intrusted through the telephone to a telegraph 
office for transmission, and vice versa. In many cases an 
order including figures of moment is sent by telephone, and 
for safety's sake these figures, by themselves, are also tele- 
graphed. Considering the fact that this is an era when men 
of capital combine rather than divide, the prospect seems to 
be that the old and the new modes of electric communication 
may before many years have but one headship and a com- 
mon purse. ^ 

In work strictly scientific the telephone widens the range 
of the ear as much as the microscope enlarges that of the eye. 
The ear is really sensitive to a degree un- 
A Marvel of Sensi- suspcctcd bcforc the invention of Pro- 
tiveness. fessor Bell measured its responsiveness. 

Sound may be distinctly heard through 
a telephonic disc whose motion involves next to no energy 
at all. It is estimated that an electric current derived from 
a pound-weight in slowly descending one foot could keep 
up an audible sound in an ordinary telephone for three thou- 
sand years ; and that a sixteen-candle-power lamp receives 
a current strong enough to yield an audible signal in sixty 
million million telephones of the refined type due to Pro- 
fessor Lodge„ Hence the exquisite sensitiveness of the 
instrument when flaws are to be found in metal shafts or 
plates, when breaks are to be located in ocean cables, or an 
infinitesimal current is to be detected in its escape from 
insulation. The main incitement in the quest for new sub- 
stances is the hope that they may be found to possess certain 
desired properties. An instrument such as the telephone 
which enables us to observe the behaviour of familiar steel 
or copper from fresh sides, does as much as if it gave us 
substances unknown before. 

At this point we are brought to consider electricity as an 
educator and quickener of the senses. Operators who Hsten 



THE SENSES QUICKENED 243 

intently hour after hour at the telephone, develop an acute- 
ness well-nigh magical in fixing the point at which a cable 
has parted under the sea, or one land wire 
has crossed another. When telegraphs Electricity and the 
were first installed in America their mes- Senses, 

sages were indented on paper registers ; 
but very soon the operators were able to receive the words 
by ear instead of through the eye. The ** sounders " of 
every telegraph office in America testify to the commonness 
of a faculty once deemed rare, that is to-day widely cultivated 
as a means of livelihood. Expert telegraphers now transmit 
as many as fifty words a minute when the messages and 
the words are short; they receive and immediately type- 
write such messages at the same speed. 

In large telephonic exchanges, and other places where 
peace and quiet are desired, small electric lamps are lighted 
by way of signal, instead of ringing bells. So sensitive do 
attendants become that lamps of the tiniest size are sufficient. 
The most exacting field of electrical communication is that 
of ocean cables. Here Mr. A. E. Kennelly says : ** So ac- 
curate does a skilled operator become that he may work 
steadily eight hours a day sending and receiving messages, 
yet not fall into one error in a whole month's work." What 
this means in precision of eye may be comprehended in 
some measure by casting a glance at the broken curves of 
a telegram as they swing out from a cable wire (Fig. 63). 
An ancient dictum of philosophy tells us that there is noth- 
ing in the mind that has not been in the senses. To give 
the senses new alertness and impressibility, to add to the 
eye, the ear, and the hand instruments a thousandfold more 
delicate, is clearly to lift research to new heights and offer 
it horizons unimagined before. 

Of all the progeny of the telephone none is more amazing 
than the photophone, also created by Professor Alexander 
Graham Bell. The telephone employs electricity as its 



244 THE TELEPHONE 

intermediary between sound from the lip and sound striking 
the ear; the photophone for the like mediation uses Hght 
instead of electricity. Milton in a famous 
The Photophone. passagc pictures Uriel sliding from hea- 
ven to earth on a sunbeam ; if the poet 
had bidden him speak through the sunbeam so that he 
need not have descended from the sky, he would not have 
more boldly departed from unpoetical facts — as facts were 
within the ken of practical men in the seventeenth century.-^ 
For simplicity the photophone is comparable with the tele- 
phone itself (Fig. 79). A speaker directs his voice upon a 
mirror of flexible mica, or microscope glass, B. Upon B light 




Fig. 79. 

Photophone. 

is thrown from the sun or a powerful lamp by the mirror M 
and the lenses A and L. As B vibrates in unison with the 
voice the rays of light reflected from B through the lens R 
to the distant parabolic mirror CC have undulations cor- 
responding to those of the spoken words. How shall light 
enable us to hear these words? Selenium has already been 
mentioned as heightened in electrical conductivity when 
light shines upon it ; that conductivity, of course, will vary 
when light of varying intensity, as in this case, impinges 

1 Paradise Lost, Book IV, line 555. 



LIGHT BECOMES VOCAL 245 

upon it. The arriving beam is focussed upon a selenium 
receiver, 5, connected with a voltaic cell, P, and the tele- 
phonic ear-pieces T, T, with the marvellous effect that the 
message is distinctly heard. 

Why, it may be asked, has not the photophone, invented 
as long ago as 1880, been exhibited to the public as freely 
as the radioscope, devised as recently as 1 896 ? The answer 
is that to secure a beam of light sufficiently uniform is so 
difficult that experiments on a popular scale are most 
troublesome. Variations of light, too small for detection 
by the eye, give rise to disturbing noises in the receiver. 
Again, the photophone has no such practical utility as the 
radioscope, at least for the present ; so long as messages 
can be sent by better means, the luminous ray will not be 
added to the resources of verbal communication. Pro- 
fessor Bell has discovered that he may on occasion dispense 
with the photophone, that the unassisted ear receives sounds 
directly from intermittent light, and, further, that all sub- 
stances whatever, carbon in the form of lampblack particu- 
larly, are excited to sonorous vibration by a flickering ray. 
Here in an unexpected quarter is confirmation of two general 
laws formulated long ago : first, that all properties in some 
degree or other are present in all forms of matter; second, 
that a property may be, and usually is, pre-eminently mani- 
fested in a single substance. We are apt to think of light 
and sound as unrelated modes of motion ; the photophone 
shows us how easily one may become the other and then 
return to its first estate. 

The singular responsiveness of selenium to light is at the 
foundation of a plan for seeing at long range, through 
wires. An image is to be represented 
by squares black and white, arranged Seeing through -wires, 
sampler fashion. Behind each square is 
to be a selenium cell affected, in its electric current, by the 
blackness or whiteness in front of it. Each cell is to be 



246 THE TELEPHONE 

then connected with a distant partner cell, which will show 
a black or white disc according as the received current is 
strong or weak. The assemblage of these second repeating- 
discs will afford the image anew. The many wires indis- 
pensable to this scheme place it among the ingenious 
suggestions that demand so large an outlay as to remain 
suggestions mereljo 



CHAPTER XVIII 

ELECTRICITY— A REVIEW AND A PROSPECT 

LET US compare electricity with its precursor, fire, and 
J we shall understand the revolution by which fire is 
now in so many tasks supplanted by the electric pulse which, 
the while, creates for itself a thousand 
fields denied to flame. Copper is an „ . .^ 

^^ iinergy in its 

excellent thermal conductor, and yet ^est Phase. 

it transmits heat almost infinitely more 
slowly than it conveys electricity. One end of a thick 
copper rod ten feet long may be safely held in the hand 
while the other end is heated to redness, yet one millionth 
part of this same energy, if in the form of electricity, would 
traverse the rod in T0-070V070-0-0" part of a second. Compare 
next electricity with light, often the companion of heat. 
Light travels in straight Hues only ; electricity can go round 
a corner every inch for miles, and, none the worse, yield a 
brilliant beam at the end of its journey. Indirectly, therefore, 
electricity enables us to conduct either heat or light as if 
both were flexible pencils of rays, and subject to but the 
smallest tolls in their travel. 

We have remarked upon such methods as those of the 
electric welder which summon intense heat without fire, and 
we have glanced at the electric lamps which shine just be- 
cause combustion is impossible through their rigid exclusion 
of air. Then for a moment we paused to look at the plating 

247 



248 ELECTRICITY— A REVIEW 

baths which have developed themselves into a command- 
ing rivalry with the blaze of the smelting furnace, with 

the flame which from time immemorial 
Heat Banished. has filled the ladle of the founder and 

moulder. Thus methods that commenced 
in dismissing flame end boldly by dispossessing heat itself. 
But, it may be said, this usurping electricity usually finds 
its source, after all, in combustion under a steam-boiler. 
True, but mark the harnessing of Niagara, of the Lachine 
Rapids near Montreal, of a thousand streams elsewhere. 
In the near future motive power of nature's giving is to be 
wasted less and less, and perforce will more and more exclude 
heat from the chain of transformations which issue in the 
locomotive's flight, in the whirl of factory and mill. Thus 
in some degree is allayed the fear, never well grounded, 
that when the coal-fields of the globe are spent civilisation 
must collapse. As the electrician hears this foreboding he 
recalls how much fuel is wasted in converting heat into 
electricity. He looks beyond either turbine or shaft turned 
by wind or tide, and, remembering that the metal dissolved 
in his battery yields at his will its full content of energy, 
either as heat or electricity, he asks. Why may not coal or 
forest tree, which are but other kinds of fuel, be made to 
do the same? 

One of the earliest uses of light was as a means of com- 
municating intelligence, and to this day the signal lamp and 

the red fire of the mariner are as useful 

as of old. But how much wider is the 

Perfected Com- 
munication, field of electricity as it creates the tele- 
graph and the telephone! In the tele- 
graph we have all that a pencil of light could be were it as 
long as an equatorial girdle and as flexible as a silken thread. 
In the telephone for nearly two thousand miles the pulsa- 
tions of a speaker's voice are not only audible, but retain 
their characteristic tones. 



PERFECT CONVERTIBILITY 249 

In the field of mechanics electricity is decidedly prefera- 
ble to any other agent. Heat may be transformed into 
motive power by a suitable engine, but 
there its adaptability is at an end. An "'^^Inil 

electric current drives not only a motor, 
but every machine and tool attached to the motor, the 
whole executing tasks of a delicacy and complication new 
to industrial art. On an electric railroad an identical current 
propels the train, directs it by telegraph, operates its signals, 
provides it with light and heat, while it stands ready to give 
constant verbal communication with any station on the line, 
if this be desired. 

In the home electricity has equal versatility, at once pro- 
moting healthfulness, refinement, and safety. Its tiny but- 
ton expels the hazardous match as it lights a lamp which 
sends forth no baleful fumes. An electric fan brings fresh 
air into the house — in summer as a grateful breeze. Simple 
telephones, quite effective for their few yards of wire, give 
a better because a more flexible service than speaking-tubes. 
Few invalids are too feeble to whisper at the light, portable ear 
of metal. Sewing-machines and the more exigent apparatus 
of the kitchen and laundry transfer their demands from 
flagging human muscles to the tireless sinews of electric 
motors — which ask no wages when they stand unemployed. 
Similar motors already enjoy favour in working the elevators 
of tall dwellings in cities. If a householder is timid about 
burglars, the electrician offers him a sleepless watchman in 
the guise of an automatic alarm ; if he has a dread of fire, 
let him dispose on his walls an array of thermometers that 
at the very inception of a blaze will strike a gong at head- 
quarters. But these, after all, are matters of minor impor- 
tance in comparison with the foundations upon which may 
be reared, not a new piece of mechanism, but a new science 
or a new art. 

In the recent and swift subjugation of the territory open 



250 ELECTRICITY— A REVIEW 

alike to the chemist and the electrician, where each ad- 
vances the quicker for the other's company, we have fresh 
confirmation of an old truth — that the 
Electricity in the Field bouudary liucs which mark off one field 
of Research. Qf scicncc from another are purely arti- 

ficial, are set up only for temporary con- 
venience. The chemist has only to dig deep enough to 
find that the physicist and himself occupy common ground. 
" Delve from the surface of your sphere to its heart, and at 
once your radius joins every other." Even the briefest 
glance at electrochemistry should pause to acknowledge 
its profound debt to the new theories as to the bonding of 
atoms to form molecules, and of the continuity between 
solution and electrical dissociation. However much these 
hypotheses may be modified as more light is shed on the 
geometry and the journeyings of the molecule, they have 
for the time being recommended themselves as finder- 
thoughts of golden value. These speculations of the chem- 
ist carry him back perforce to the days of his childhood. 
As he then joined together his black and white bricks he 
found that he could build cubes of widely different patterns. 
It was in propounding a theory of molecular architecture 
that Kekule gave an impetus to a vast and growing branch 
of chemical industry — that of the synthetic production of 
dyes and allied compounds. 

It was in pure research, in paths undirected to the market- 
place, that such theories have been thought out. Let us 
consider electricity as an aid to investigation conducted for 
its own sake. The chief physical generalisation of our time, 
and of all time, the persistence of force, emerged to view 
only with the dawn of electric art. When it was observed 
that electricity might become heat, light, chemical action, 
or mechanical motion, that in turn any of these might pro- 
duce electricity, it was at once indicated that all these 
phases of energy might differ from each other only as the 



THE DEBT TO RESEARCH 251 

movements in circles, volutes, and spirals of ordinary mech- 
anism. The suggestion was confirmed when electrical 
measurers were refined to the utmost precision, and a single 
quantum of energy was revealed a very Proteus in its dis- 
guises, yet beneath these disguises nothing but constancy 
itself. 

" There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth ; and there 
is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to 
poverty." Because the geometers of old patiently explored 
the properties of the triangle, the circle, and the ellipse, 
simply for pure love of truth, they laid the corner-stones 
for the arts of the architect, the engineer, and the navigator. 
In like manner it was the disinterested work of investigation 
conducted by Ampere, Faraday, Henry, and their compeers 
in ascertaining the laws of electricity which made possible 
the telegraph, the telephone, the dynamo, and the electric 
furnace. The vital relations between pure research and 
economic gain have at last worked themselves clear. It is 
perfectly plain that a man who has it in him to discover laws 
of matter and energy does incomparably more for his kind 
than if he carried his talents to the mint for conversion into 
coin. The voyage of a Columbus may not immediately 
bear as much fruit as the uncoverings of a mine prospector, 
but in the long run a Columbus makes possible the finding 
many mines which without him no prospector would ever 
see. Therefore let the seed-corn of knowledge be planted 
rather than eaten. But in choosing between one research 
and another it is impossible to foretell which may prove the 
richer in its harvests ; for instance, all attempts thus far 
economically to oxidise carbon for the production of elec- 
tricity have failed, yet in observations that at first seemed 
equally barren have lain the hints to which we owe the in- 
candescent lamp and the wireless telegraph. 

Perhaps the most promising field of electrical research 
is that of discharges at high pressures ; here the leading 



252 ELECTRICITY— A REVIEW 

American investigators are Professor John Trowbridge and 
Professor Elihu Tliomson. Employing a tension estimated 
at one and a half million volts, Professor Trowbridge has 
produced flashes of lightning six feet in length in atmo- 
spheric air; in a tube exhausted to one-seventh of atmo- 
spheric pressure the flashes extended themselves to forty 
feet. According to this inquirer, the familiar rending of 
trees by lightning is due to the intense heat developed in 
an instant by the electric spark; the sudden expansion of 
air or steam in the cavities of the wood causes an explosion. 
The experiments of Professor Thomson confront him with 
some of the seeming contradictions which ever await the 
explorer of new scientific territory. In the atmosphere an 
electrical discharge is facilitated when a metallic terminal 
(as a lightning-rod) is shaped as a point ; under oil a point 
is the form least favourable to discharge. In the same Hne 
of paradox it is observed that oil steadily improves in its 
insulating effect the higher the electrical pressure committed 
to its keeping; with air as an insulator the contrary is the 
fact. These and a goodly array of similar puzzles will, 
without doubt, be cleared up as students in the twentieth 
century pass from the twiHght of anomaly to the sunshine 
of ascertained law. 

** Before there can be applied science there must be 
science to apply," and it is by enabling the investigator to 
know nature under a fresh aspect that electricity rises to 
its highest office. The laboratory routine of ascertaining 
the conductivity, polarisabiHty, and other electrical prop- 
erties of matter is dull and exacting work, but it opens to 
the student new windows through which to peer at the ar- 
chitecture of matter. That architecture, as it rises to his 
view, discloses one law of structure after another ; what in 
a first and clouded glance seemed anomaly is now resolved 
and reconciled ; order displays itself where once anarchy 
alone appeared. When the investigator now needs a sub- 



EXPLOITATION AIDS RESEARCH 253 

stance of peculiar properties he knows where to find it, or 
has a hint for its creation — a creation perhaps new in the 
history of the world. As he thinks of the wealth of qualities 
possessed by his store of alloys, salts, acids, alkaHes, new 
uses for them are borne into his mind. Yet more — a new 
orchestration of inquiry is possible by means of the in- 
struments created for him by the electrician, through the 
advances in method which these instruments effect. With 
a second and more intimate point of view arrives a new 
trigonometry of the particle, a trigonometry inconceivable 
in pre-electric days. Hence a surround is in progress which 
early in the twentieth century may go full circle, making 
atom and molecule as obedient to the chemist as brick and 
stone are to the builder now. 

The laboratory investigator and the commercial exploiter 
of his discoveries have been by turns borrower and lender, 
to the great profit of both. What Leyden jar could ever 
be constructed of the size and revealing power of an Atlantic 
cable ? And how many refinements of measurement, of 
purification of metals, of precision in manufacture, have 
been imposed by the colossal investments in deep-sea teleg- 
raphy alone! When a current admitted to an ocean cable, 
such as that between Brest and New York, can choose for 
its path either 3540 miles of copper wire or a quarter of an 
inch of gutta-percha, there is a dangerous opportunity for 
escape into the sea, unless the current is of nicely adjusted 
strength, and the insulator has been made and laid with the 
best-informed skill, the most conscientious care. In the 
constant tests required in laying the first cables Lord Kelvin 
(then Professor William Thomson) felt the need for better 
designed and more sensitive galvanometers or current mea- 
surers. His great skill both as a mathematician and a 
mechanician created the existing instruments, which seem 
beyond improvement. They serve not only in commerce 
and manufacture, but in promoting the strictly scientific 



254 ELECTRICITY— A REVIEW 

work of the laboratory. Now that electricity purifies cop- 
per as fire cannot, the mathematician is able to treat his 
problems of long-distance transmission, of traction, of ma- 
chine design, with an economy and certainty impossible 
when his materials were not simply impure, but impure in 
varying and indefinite degrees. The factory and the work- 
shop originally took their magneto-machines from the ex- 
perimental laboratory ; they have returned them remodelled 
beyond recognition as dynamos and motors of almost ideal 
effectiveness. 

A galvanometer actuated by a thermo-electric pile fur- 
nishes much the most sensitive means of detecting changes 
of temperature ; hence electricity enables the physicist to 
study the phenomena of heat with new ease and precision. 
It was thus that Professor Tyndall conducted the classical 
researches set forth in his Heat as a Mode of Motio7t, ascer- 
taining the singular power to absorb terrestrial heat which 
makes the aqueous vapour of the atmosphere act as an in- 
dispensable blanket to the earth. 

And how vastly has electricity, whether in the workshop 

or laboratory, enlarged our conceptions of the forces that 

thrill space, of the substances, seemingly 

^niar^ed^^^ SO simplc, that surrouud us — substances 

that propound questions of structure and 

behaviour that silence the acutest investigator. "You ask 

me," said a great physicist, *' if I have a theory of the 

universe ? Why, I have n't even a theory of 'magnetism ! " 

The conventional phrase " conducting a current" is now 
understood to be mere figure of speech ; it is thought that 
a wire does little else than give direction to electric energy. 
Pulsations of high tension have been proved to be mainly 
superficial in their journeys, so that they are best conveyed 
(or convoyed) by conductors of tubular form. And what 
is it that moves when we speak of conduction? It seems 
to be now the molecule of atomic chemistry, and anon the 



FRICTION ABSENT 255 

same ether that undulates with light or radiant heat. In- 
deed, the conquest of electricity means so much because 
it impresses the molecule and the ether into service as its 
vehicles of communication. Instead of the old-time masses 
of metal, or bands of leather, which moved stiffly through 
ranges comparatively short, there is to-day employed a 
medium which may traverse 186,400 miles a second, and 
with resistances most trivial in contrast with those of me- 
chanical friction. 

And what is friction in the last analysis but the production 
of motion in undesired forms, the allowing valuable energy 
to do useless work ? In that amazing case of long-distance 
transmission, common sunshine, a solar beam arrives at the 
earth from the sun not one whit the weaker for its excursion 
of 92,000,000 miles. It is highly probable that we are 
surrounded by similar cases of the total absence of friction 
in the phenomena of both physics and chemistry, and that 
art will come nearer and nearer to nature in this immunity 
is assured when we see how many steps in that direction 
have already been taken by the electrical engineer. In a 
preceding page a brief account was given of the theory that 
gases and vapours are in ceaseless motioUo This motion 
suffers no abatement from friction, and hence we may infer 
that the molecules concerned are perfectly elastic. The 
opinion is gaining ground among physicists that all the 
properties of matter, transparency, chemical combinability, 
and the rest, are due to immanent motion in particular 
orbits, with diverse velocities. If this be established, then 
these motions also suffer no friction, and go on without 
resistance forever. 

As the investigators in the vanguard of science discuss 
the constitution of matter, and weave hypotheses more or 
less fruitful as to the interplay of its forces, there is a grow- 
ing faith that the day is at hand when the tie between elec- 
tricity and gravitation will be unveiled — when the reason 



256 ELECTRICITY— A REVIEW 

why matter has weight will cease to puzzle the thinker. 
Who can tell what rehef of man's estate may be bound up 
with the ability to transform any phase of energy into any 
other without the circuitous methods and serious losses of 
to-day! In the sphere of economic progress one of the 
supreme advances was due to the invention of money, the 
providing a medium for which any saleable thing may 
be exchanged, with which any purchasable thing may be 
bought. As soon as a shell, or a hide, or a bit of metal 
was recognised as having universal convertibility, all the 
delays and discounts of barter were at an end. In the 
world of physics and chemistry the corresponding medium 
is electricity ; let it be produced as readily as it produces 
other modes of motion, and human art will take a stride 
forward such as when Volta disposed his zinc and silver 
discs together, or when Faraday set a magnet moving 
around a copper wire. 

For all that the electric current is not as yet produced as 
economically as it should be, we do wrong if we regard it 
as an infant force. However much new 
Electricity not an knowledge may do with electricity in the 
Infant. laboratory, in the factory, or in the ex- 

change, some of its best work is already 
done. It is not likely ever to perform a greater feat than 
placing all mankind within ear-shot of each other. Were 
electricity unmastered there could be no democratic govern- 
ment of the United States. To-day the drama of national 
affairs is more directly in view of every American citizen 
than, a century ago, the public business of Delaware could 
be to the men of that httle State. And when on the 
broader stage of international politics misunderstandings 
arise, let us note how the telegraph has modified the hard- 
and-fast rules of old-time diplomacy. To-day, through the 
columns of the press, the facts in controversy are instantly 
published throughout the world, and thus so speedily give 



THE WORLD ONE PARISH 



■57 



rise to authoritative comment that a severe strain is put 
upon negotiators whose tradition it is to be both secret and 
slow. 

Railroads, with all they mean for civilisation, could not 
have extended themselves without the telegraph to control 
them. And railroads and telegraphs are the sinews and 
nerves of national life, the prime agencies in welding the 
diverse and widely separated States and Territories of the 
Union. A Boston merchant builds a cotton-mill in Georgia ; 
a New York capitalist opens a copper-mine in Arizona. The 
telegraph which informs them day by day how their invest- 
ments prosper tells idle men where they can find work, 
where work can seek idle men. Chicago is laid in ashes, 
Charleston topples in earthquake, Johnstown is whelmed in 
flood, and instantly a continent springs to their relief. And 
what benefits issue in the strictly commercial uses of the 
telegraph! At its click both locomotive and steamship 
speed to the relief of famine in any quarter of the globe. 
In times of plenty or of dearth the markets of the world are 
merged and are brought to every man's door. Not less 
striking is the neighbourhood guild of science, born, too, 
of the telegraph. The day after Rontgen announced his 
X rays, physicists on every continent were repeating his 
experiments — were applying his discovery to the healing of 
the wounded and diseased. Let an anti-toxin for diphtheria, 
consumption, or yellow fever be proposed, and a hundred 
investigators the world over bend their skill to confirmation 
or disproof, as if the suggestor dwelt next door. 

On a stage less dramatic, or rather not dramatic at all, 
electricity works equal good. Its motor freeing us from 
dependence on the horse is spreading 
our towns and cities into their adjoining Social Benefits, 
country. Field and garden compete with 
airless streets. The sunny cottage is in active rivalry with 
the odious tenement-house. It is found that transportation 



258 ELECTRICITY— A REVIEW 

within the gates of a metropolis has an importance second 
only to the means of transit which links one city with 
another. The engineer is at last filling the gap which too 
long existed between the traction of horses and that of 
steam. In point of speed, cleanliness, and comfort such an 
electric subway as that of South London leaves nothing to 
be desired. Throughout America electric roads, at first 
suburban, are now fast joining town to town and city to 
city, while, as auxiliaries to steam railroads, they place 
sparsely settled communities in the arterial current of the 
world, and build up a ready market for the dairyman and 
the fruit-grower. In its saving of what Mr. Oscar T. Crosby 
has called ** man-hours " the third-rail system is beginning 
to oust steam as a motive power from trunk-lines. Already 
shrewd railroad managers are granting partnerships to the 
electricians who might otherwise encroach upon their divi- 
dends. A service at first restricted to passengers has now 
extended itself to the carriage of letters and parcels, and 
begins to reach out for common freight. We may soon see 
the farmer's cry for good roads satisfied by good electric 
lines that will take his crops to market much more cheaply 
and quickly than horses and macadam ever did. In cities, 
electromobile cabs and vans steadily increase in numbers, 
furthering the quiet and cleanliness introduced by the 
trolley car. 

A word has been said about the blessings which elec- 
tricity promises to country folk, yet greater are the boons 

it stands ready to bestow in the hives of 
Municipal Electricity, population. Until a fcw dccadcs ago 

the water-supply of cities was a matter 
not of municipal but of individual enterprise ; water was 
drawn in large part from wells here and there, from lines of 
piping laid in favoured localities, and always insufficient. 
Many an epidemic of typhoid fever was due to the con- 
tamination of a spring by a cesspool a few yards away. 
To-day a supply such as that of New York is abundant 



HOPES SOUND AND UNSOUND 259 

and cheap because it enters every house. Let a central- 
ised electrical service enjoy a like privilege, and it will 
offer a current which is heat, light, chemical energy, or 
motive power, and all at a wage lower than that of any 
other servant. Unwittingly, then, the electrical engineer is 
a political reformer of high degree, for he puts a new pre- 
mium upon ability and justice at the City Hall. His sole 
condition is that electricity shall be under control at once 
competent and honest. Let us hope that his plea, joined to 
others as weighty, may quicken the spirit of civic righteous- 
ness so that some of the richest fruits ever borne in the 
garden of science and art may not be proffered in vain. 
Flame, the old-time servant, is individual ; electricity, its 
successor and heir, is collective. Flame sits upon the hearth 
and draws a family together; electricity, weUing from a 
public source, may bind into a unit all the families of a 
vast city, because it makes the benefit of each the interest 
of all. 

But not every promise brought forward in the name of 
the electrician has his assent or sanction. So much has 
been done by electricity, and so much 
more is plainly feasible, that a reflection Baseless Hopes, 
of its triumphs has gilded many a baseless 
dream. One of these is that the cheap electric motor, by 
supplying power at home, will break up the factory system, 
and bring back the domestic manufacturing of old days. 
But if this power cost nothing at all the gift would leave 
the factory unassailed ; for we must remember that power 
is being steadily reduced in cost from year to year, so that 
in many industries it has but a minor place among the ex- 
penses of production. The strength and profit of the fac- 
tory system lie in its assembling a wide variety of machines, 
the first delivering its product to the second for another 
step toward completion, and so on until a finished article is 
sent to the wareroom. It is this minute subdivision of 
labour, together with the saving and efficiency that inure to 



26o ELECTRICITY— A REVIEW 

a business conducted on an immense scale under a single 
manager, that bids us believe that the factory has come to 
stay. To be sure, a weaver, a potter, or a lens-grinder of 
peculiar skill may thrive at his loom or wheel at home ; but 
such a man is far from typical in modern manufacture. 
Besides, it is very questionable whether the lamentations 
over the home industries of the past do not ignore evil con- 
comitants such as still linger in the home industries of the 
present — those of the sweater's den, for example. 

This rapid survey of what electricity has done and may 
yet do — futile expectation dismissed — has shown it the 

creator of a thousand material resources, 

A New and Supreme the pcrfcctcr of that Communication of 

Resource. things, of powcr, of thought, which in 

every prior stage of advancement has 
marked the successive lifts of humanity. It was much 
when the savage loaded a pack upon a horse or an ox 
in.stead of upon his own back ; it was yet more when he 
could make a beacon-flare give news or warning to a whole 
country-side, instead of being limited to the messages which 
might be read in his waving hands. All that the modern 
engineer was able to do with steam for locomotion is raised 
to a higher plane by the advent of his new power, while the 
long-distance transmission of electrical energy is contracting 
the dimensions of the planet to a scale upon which its cata- 
racts in the wilderness drive the spindles and looms of the 
factory town, or illuminate the thoroughfares of cities. 
Beyond and above all such services as these, electricity is 
the corner-stone of physical generalisation, a revealer of 
truths impenetrable by any other ray. 

The subjugation of fire has done much in giving man a 
new independence of nature, a mighty armoury against evil. 
In curtailing the most arduous and brutalising forms of toil, 
electricity, that subtiler kind of fire, carries this emancipa- 
tion a long step further, and, meanwhile, bestows upon the 
poor many a luxury which but lately was the exclusive pos- 



FLAME FAR SURPASSED 261 

session of the rich. In more closely binding up the good 
of the bee with the welfare of the hive, it is an educator 
and confirmer of every social bond. In so far as it proffers 
new help in the war on pain and disease it strengthens the 
confidence of man in an Order of Right and Happiness 
which for so many dreary ages ha's been a matter rather of 
hope than of vision. Are we not, then, justified in holding 
electricity to be a multiplier of faculty and insight, a means 
of dignifying mind and soul, unexampled since man first 
kindled fire and rejoiced? 

We have traced how dexterity rose to fire-making, how 
fire-making led to the subjugation of electricity. Much of 
the most telling work of fire can be better done by its great 
successor, while electricity performs many tasks possible 
only to itself. Unwitting truth there was in the simple 
fable of the captive who let down a spider's film, that drew 
up a thread, which in turn brought up a rope — and freedom. 
It was in 1 800, on the threshold of the nineteenth century, 
that Volta devised the first electric battery. In a hundred 
years the force then liberated has vitally interwoven itself 
with every art and science, bearing fruit not to be imagined 
even by men of the stature of Watt, Lavoisier, or Hum- 
boldt. Compare this rapid march of conquest with the slow 
adaptation, through age after age, of fire to cooking, smelt- 
ing, tempering. Yet it was partly, perhaps mainly, because 
the use of fire had drawn out man's intelligence and culti- 
vated his skill that he was ready in the fulness of time so 
quickly to seize upon electricity and subdue it. 

Electricity is as legitimately the offspring of fire as fire 
of the simple knack in which one savage in ten thousand 
was richer than his fellows. The principle of permutation, 
suggested in both victories, interprets not only how a vast 
empire is won by a new weapon of prime dignity; it 
explains why such empires are brought under rule with 
ever-accelerated pace. Every talent only pioneers the way 
for the richer talents which are born from it. 



CHAPTER XIX 

THE THRESHOLD OF PHOTOGRAPHY 

IN two remarkable cases we have seen how possessions at 
first prized for one quahty have, quite incidentally, dis- 
closed another which in the end has become of paramount 
importance. The savage, his attention 

The Incidental may rivctcd UpOU the sharpUCSS of his fliutS 
become Para- - i • i i • r 

mount. loi* arrows, chisels, or knives, for ages 

glanced incuriously when a stone in its 
flaking struck out sparks. Yet in kindling fire the flint did 
man a loftier service than when it pointed a spear, or gave 
edge to a saw or a sword. When stone had given way to 
bronze, and bronze in turn was displaced by iron, the metal 
at first was esteemed for its strength alone. That small 
masses of it found here and there should be lodestones was 
singular, but nothing more ; the fact for ages lay barren of 
either worth or meaning. To-day, as electric art passes 
from one new province to another in the expansion of its 
empire, the query is whether the strength or the magnetism 
of iron is its chief quality. 

Let us observe for a moment human activity in the broad 
contrasts of the necessary toil of work, and the chosen toil, 
often more arduous, of play. Modern athletes in training 
for a boat race or a foot-ball match, sportsmen in stalking 
Rocky Mountain sheep or hunting the big game of India, 
show us a reversion to a primal instinct as they undertake 
labours and undergo hardships of extreme severity for sheer 

262 



REPRESENTATION BEGINS 263 

delight in their sport. And in such joy of old, not less than 
in dehberate exercise of skill, did human art begin. When 
a primitive armourer had finished making a cudgel he ex- 
pressed his unexhausted sense of power, his delight in form 
and colour, by daubing the wood with bands of ochre, by 
carving upon it rude waves and rounds. If he shaped and 
sharpened a knife he added a few incised flourishes, to pro- 
claim that there should be beauty as well as use in the 
thing that he had made. This overbrimming of the cup of 
life had other manifestations : the early artist scrawled upon 
the walls of caves, or at the base of cliffs, profiles as crude 
as those which boys to-day chalk upon barns and fences. 
Sometimes he pressed and patted a dollop of clay into a 
human image at first so rude that we wonder whether he 
meant to make an idol or a doll, an object of worship or a 
plaything for a child. 

Who can retrace at this late day the hint or push that 
impelled him to all this? It may have been in staining or 
painting his own body that skill was acquired for his sim- 
ple patterns, his repeated strokes and curves. His first 
essay in plastic art may have been incited by the impress 
left on wet clay when a leaf, or nut, was lifted from the 
ground. Whatever the material, whether sand, or clay, or 
common earth, whether spread or moulded with twig, 
splintered bone, or shell, the moment a likeness of leaf or 
fruit, of man or beast, was wrought faithfully enough for 
recognition by another eye, a new morning dawned for the 
human soul. What had begun in sportive outlines, in mere 
idle ornament, took root for a thousand harvests of use and 
beauty. Then arose the art of Representation, the putting 
sign for substance, semblance for reality, the betokening a 
thing by its swiftly created outline or image. Thence have 
sprung sculpture, painting, writing, printing — throughout 
their later course advancing with equal pace beside that 
consummate symbolism, articulate speech. 



264 THRESHOLD OF PHOTOGRAPHY 




Fig. 80. 
Carving from the caves of the Dordogne Valley, France. 



Of Imitative art in Its first unsteady steps few traces have 
been unearthed : favoured by the durability of their material, 
some of the best portrayals known are among the oldest 
In the caves of the Dordogne Valley, in southern France, 
there dwelt in the days of the now long-extinct mammoth, 
hunters who were artists too. Their carvings on bone 



PRIMITIVE PICTURES 265 

depict deer and horses with a force and freedom that would 
do credit to modern pencils (Fig. 80). But depictive art 
in stages lowly in comparison with the 

Dordogne carvings would gladden its Primitive Delineation. 

rude beholders, and spur the talent of 
every man who had it in him to draw, or paint, or carve 
with more than common dexterity. There was use as well 
as delight in these creations, for all their crudity. The 
roughly hewn totem or emblem, bear, crow, or dog, pro- 
tected the property of an Indian chief or priest as securely 
as if he himself stood on guard. From such unwitting 
heraldry, from the execution of individual portraits of war- 
rior and leader, the artist rose to a composition which 
depicted a battle or a hunt— at first, we may be sure, with 
httle other success than to provide an aid to the memory 
of annalists, to keep in remembrance the proud traditions 
that descended from father to son (Fig. 81). 

Both pictures and figures grew better as their creators 
gained practice, and as they became more expert in the 
grinding of pigments, or in the use of tools borrowed from 
humbler arts, or expressly devised for the primitive studio. 
Thus it came about at last that the recorder, the priest, 
the seer, was no longer a mere speaker who had to be 
present when he told his story. Ages after his death his 
pictures, images, reliefs, remained to echo his voice to men 
who had never looked upon his face, and this, perchance, 
on shores many leagues removed from the artist's home or 
grave. Art had begun its victory over time and space. 
Knowledge could now be accumulated as never before : in 
much a man might now begin where his father had left off. 
Of the excellence to which American aboriginal art rose 
in its latest pictures and pictographs, we have hundreds of 
examples in the volumes of Schoolcraft, and Cathn, and of 
the United States Bureau of Ethnology. While primitive 
art was quietly opening a door to new and refined pleasures 



Fig. 8i. 

(From H. R. Schoolcraft, History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian 
Tribes of the United States. Philadelphia, 1854, Vol. IV, p. 253, plate 32.) 



Taken from the shoulder-blade of a buffalo found on the plains in the Comanche 
country of Texas. Symbolises the strife for the buffalo existing between the Indian 
and white races. The Indian (i), presented on horseback protected by his shield 
and armed with a lance, kills a Spaniard (3), the latter being armed with a gun, 
after a circuitous chase (6). The Spaniard's companion (4), armed with a lance, 
is also killed. The sun is depicted by 2, the buffalo by 5. 



A NEW DEPARTURE 267 

of the eye, it was conferring new values upon old utilities. 
The art which could indicate a path of safety or the vicinity 
of a foe, point to hidden stores of food or springs of refresh- 
ing water, did quite as much for the safety and comfort 
of primitive man as his rude stone hammer or even the 
chance-kindled flame which his roving eye might discern as 
it glimmered in the distance. 

However far draughtsm^en, illuminators, painters, etchers, 
may have carried verisimilitude, there was no essential advance 
in imitative art down to the first decade 
of the nineteenth century. All the com- Primitive Representa- 

r . 1.1- tio" Held its Path till 

pany of artists, recent and remote, glori- a Hundred Years Ago. 
ous and inglorious alike, from the earliest 
to the latest, had but one method in copying nature — to 
express, line by line, stroke by stroke, what their eyes saw 
before them. Their vision might be distorted or dull, their 
brains careless or unfaithful in allying eye with hand ; their 
fingers might be clumsy, their tools or pigments faulty or 
inadequate. By all this did reproduction fall short of its 
original, or erroneously surpass it, and set down falsity in- 
stead of truth. It was left for the nineteenth century to 
make the faithful touch of Hght limn its own impressions 
with more and more accuracy of form and of colour, with 
illusions, too, of relief and motion, while images which find 
no response in the eye are in a most indirect and aston- 
ishing manner disclosed to sight. As Photographer man 
enters upon a new career as Initiator, reserving for his 
hand and eye those high tasks which they alone may ac- 
complish, deputing to the retina of the camera, to the play 
of chemic affinity, the labour of seizing every radiance of 
the earth and sky. 

Electric science and art swing upon a hinge of iron. 
Were it not for the ease and celerity with which iron can 
take on magnetism and let it go, there would be no electro- 
magnet as the core of the telegraph instrument, the tele- 



268 THRESHOLD OF PHOTOGRAPHY 

phone, the dynamo, and the motor. In some degree or 
other all substances are magnetic, but most of them in a 

degree so trifling as virtually to possess 
A Pivot of Silver. no magnetism whatever. Nickel, which 

in the magnetic hierarchy stands next to 
iron, has but one-sixtieth its attractive power. While 
electric art thus turns upon a hinge of iron, photography 
revolves upon a pivot of silver. All substances, me- 
tallic compounds especially, are responsive to light — are 
altered by it in constitution, with an accompanying change 
of colour. Yet so pre-eminent in this sensitive quality are 
the salts of silver that without them it is unlikely that we 
should have any photography at all. The chameleon na- 
ture of silver compounds is foreshown in silver as a simple 
element ; it occurs in three forms, each of distinct hue. If 
stencils are laid upon a polished silver plate and exposed to 
direct sunshine for two to three hours, an image may be 
developed by mercury vapour, as in the Daguerre method, 
or by such a bath as that used for wet collodion plates. 
Combined with one and the same proportion of bromine, 
silver displays six diverse orders of molecular architecture, 
each having a characteristic tint. In the highly complex 
structures which silver forms with other proportions of 
bromine, nitrogen, chlorine, or iodine, its unions are so 
unstable as to be dissevered by a weightless ray of light, 
and this in many cases in the fraction of a second. Fortu- 
nately, this molecular shattering, for all its swiftness, is 
commonly attended by decided alterations of colour. 

Nature's own laboratory was the photographer's ante- 
room. Generations before his art was so much as a dream 

the miners at Freiberg, in Germany, 
A Hint from the Mine, had comc upou Small lumps of Ore which 

excited their keen curiosity. In hue and 
texture it resembled whitish horn ; in the fire it disengaged 
silver: so it was called horn-silver. Its remarkable pecu- 
liarity was that when brought into daylight its hue com- 



THE FINGER OF LIGHT 269 

menced at once to change to violet. In due season it was 
proved to be silver chloride and was successfully imitated 
by chemic art. Its cousin, silver nitrate, familiar as lunar 
caustic, had long been noted for a kindred trait: when 
moistened and spread upon the skin, or other surface, its 
transparency was quickly changed to opaque blackness as 
organic salts were formed. This power of light upon sil- 
ver compounds was a strong hint to many an ingenious 
mind a century ago. Among them were Schultze, in Ger- 
many, and Wedgwood, in England, who saw that here lay 
the promise of copying outlines by the finger of light itself. 
Both of them pressed leaves, fern-fronds, and flowers upon 
paper saturated with silver solution, and allowed sunshine 
to fall upon the paper and the objects laid upon it. Then, 
for the first time since man appeared 
upon earth, his hand and eye were 
freed from the drudgery of catching 
a contour. His eye, however poor in 
observation, his hand, let it lack skill 
as it might, sufficed to bring to- 
gether the object to be outlined and 
the sensitive paper; he could then 

intrust to liq^ht the remainder of the ^ 

^ Fig. 82. 

work (Fig. 82). Here was just such ^^^^^ leaf outlined on 
an epoch-making feat as the inten- sensitive paper, 

tional kindling of ablaze, or the de- 
liberate rubbing of amber to educe electricity ; power of a 
new order began to spread its vistas to the eye and the 
mind of man. 

One stumbling-block at the very outset of the process 
threatened to be fatal : no sooner was the protected part of 
the paper withdrawn from the shadow of the object laid 
upon it to be copied than the light proceeded to blacken 
every portion of the surface not black already. Light 
created a picture, and at once wrought its ruin. The ob- 
vious need was a solvent for the silver compound which 




270 THRESHOLD OF PHOTOGRAPHY 

remained unchanged in the part of the paper protected 

from the light, so that the silver might thence be removed, 

leaving the light no opportunity to do 

The Outlines are harm. With such aid from the chemist 
Detained. ^n unchangeable image of the thing copied 

would be left behind. In this emer- 
gency Fox-Talbot was fortunate enough to discover that a 
strong solution of common salt was effectual. But a sol- 
vent much to be preferred to sodium chloride is sodium 
thiosulphite, first used by Sir John Herschel in 1839, al- 
though he had ascertained its powers twenty years before, 
— when it was called sodium hyposulphite, a name which 
the compound still commonly bears. Notwithstanding 
many an attempt to replace it, sodium thiosulphite meets 
the needs of fixation to-day as it did when first he em- 
ployed it. With assured touch and new confidence our 
copyists then reproduced engravings, etchings, manu- 
scripts, attaining successes which made them bolder still. 
They learned much by the way concerning the best periods 
for exposure, the soundest methods for fixing and toning 
prints, the care and cleanliness inexorable even for the 
rudiments of photographic manipulation.^ 

But copying by contact is a narrow business, after all, 
and its adepts soon grew tired of it. W^hy should not 
light be impressed into taking pictures directly from the 
face of nature herself? To every question its answer. At 
this juncture there arrived a reinforcement from a quarter 
remote indeed from the chemist's laboratory. Ever since 

1 In remarkable contrast with the first mode of photographic copying is the 
" absorption " method shown by Mr. J. Hort Player at the Royal Photo- 
graphic Society's exhibition, London, September, 1899. This method is to 
place an etching, a mezzotint, a picture, or document of any kind with its 
face uppermost, and lay upon it in close contact the sensitive surface of a piece 
of bromide paper subjected to yellow or green light. On development this 
furnishes a negative from which prints are obtained in the usual way. Surely 
it can only have been by the rarest instinct for experiment that the discoverer 
came upon so unforeseeable an effect as this. 



THE CAMERA ADOPTED 271 

keyholes have admitted sunbeams into porches, lobbies, 
and rooms otherwise dark, they have projected images of 
surrounding scenery, of the panorama of 
passing life, full of charm and beauty. The Photographic 

-T->/^- • 111-ri 1 1- Camera is In- 

To Giambattista della rorta, who lived vented, 

in Italy three centuries ago, these im- 
ages were no idle marvel; they said. Repeat the con- 
struction of this dark room, only make it smaller so that it 
may be easily carried about, and sharpen its pictures by 
putting lenses in the aperture through which your light 
streams in. When Porta had done all this he had made 
the camera obscura, an instrument popular from his day 
almost down to our own with scene-painters and other 
artists who wished either to portray a striking bit of land- 
scape, or to enrich their portfolios with vignettes for ideal 
compositions. We can well imagine these men toiHng at 
outline and tint, shadow and shade, devoutly wishing for 
some plan by which they might secure once for all the 
delicate hues, the refined half-tones, so elusive to pencil 
and brush. Their longing was to be fulfilled, but only 
after many days. 

Fortunately there was a pioneer in breaking away from 
mere copying by contact, an experimenter of genius, who 
was at once familiar with the camera and its images, and 
with the chemical effects of the solar ray. His prede- 
cessors had availed themselves of the alterations of colour 
which accompany the chemical changes due to an imping- 
ing beam of light. He proceeded upon a different and 
quite original path. He ascertained — it is not known how — 
that exposure to light effected a remarkable change in the 
solubility of asphalt, a film of which kept in the dark was as 
easily dissolved in essential oils as common salt in water, 
but after a few hours' exposure to sunshine resisted the 
action of these oils as stoutly as so much stone. In 1 8 16, 
in an hour momentous for human art, Nicephore Niepce 



272 THRESHOLD OF PHOTOGRAPHY 

placed an asphalt plate within a camera, and photography 
— as we know it — began. The film having been " exposed," 
then removed from the camera and bathed in oil, showed 
a clear and beautiful image in low relief. 

The structure and office of the eye had now been imitated 
in such wise as to extend vision far beyond the narrow 
horizons of sight. Mark the fidelity of the imitation : 
the eye has its lid, the camera lenses their cap ; the iris of 
the operator is repeated in his diaphragm ; the aqueous 
and vitreous humours of the eye-ball so complement each 
other in their qualities of refraction and dispersion as to be 
achromatic, and, thanks to Dollond, a like result follows 
the combination of crown- and flint-glass in the lenses. 
Physiologists, indeed, are persuaded that when we see an 
object, the impression is due to a succession of evanescent 
images formed so rapidly upon the retina as to seem one 
picture ; the silvered plate of modern photography is there- 
fore deemed only a retina having an impressibility which 
is lasting instead of transient. What, then, is invention in 
its furthest reaches but imitation? It is only by faithfully 
following the footprints of nature that the inventor attains 
the point where he traces them no more, beyond which 
the scientific imagination is his only guide. 

It was in the combination of two lines of experiment, each 
of them of a high order, that Niepce stood forth as one of 
the greatest inventors of all time. He united his camera 
with a sensitive plate for a fruitfulness almost worthy to 
rank with that which has followed upon the achievement 
of Volta, or upon the deed of the hero who first made fire 
his bond-servant. Sight, thanks to Niepce, now came to 
its final supersedure of touch. There was a time in the 
earliest history of the globe when touch was the one sense 
which distinguished organic life; the amoeba remains to 
tell us how simple that life was. In fresh-water ponds and 
ditches the microscope reveals this animalcule — which 




THE HAND SUPERSEDED 273 

stands lowest on the ladder of life„ Destitute of sight, it 
thrusts out its finger-like projections for food — which it 
absorbs rather than digests (Fig. 83). Perchance, begin- 
ning with creatures as humble as this, hght 
slowly created the eye, so that at last ani- 
mals could know about external things 
without having to touch them. Contrast 
such an animal, however lowly, with the Fig. S3. 

amoeba possessed of the single sense of Amoeba, much en- 
touch, and note the incalculable advantage ^^^^ * 
of being able to detect food, or enemies, or discern shel- 
ter, beyond the range of mere contact. No small part of 
the gulf between man and amoeba consists in man being 
able to know infinitely more through his eye than by his 
hand. Sight presents him with an illimitable universe in- 
stead of the little world in which the fingers of the blind 
cautiously grope. Vision, it is highly probable, began 
with the simple power to discriminate light from darkness, 
this passing into ability to discern outlines, then the forms 
within these outlines with more and more distinctness ; 
next the estimation of distances might follow, with, possibly, 
a slow but constant increase in the perception of colours. 
A development which demanded ages in the case of the 
eye, was repeated in but a few years as that artificial eye, 
the camera, parted with one imperfection after another, 
and came at last not only to equal almost every power of 
vision, but to attain a responsiveness to rays that fall upon 
the retina as idly as upon a stone. 

The human hand has had no higher office than to depict 
what the eye can see ; that service was to rise to a plane 
loftier still on the memorable day when, at the bidding of 
Niepce, it obliged light to print its own images, to be 
limner as well as revealer. Uncounted ages stand between 
the savage who first streaked himself with woad or ochre, 
and the artist who to-day sketches a landscape with his 



274 THRESHOLD OF PHOTOGRAPHY 

pencil, or paints a portrait with his brush. When once 
man saw the feasibihty of deputing the labour of represen- 
tation to a beam of Hght his progress was rapid; in less 
than a century he has virtually perfected his art, and in 
many tasks of simple depiction has as far surpassed the 
scope of brush and pencil as these reach beyond the 
scrawls and smearings of the cave-dweller. 

Niepce, in 1829, entered into partnership with Daguerre, 
a scene-painter who had attempted in an original way to 

fix the beautiful pictures of the camera 

The Partnership of obscura. Beginning wkh the use of the 

Daguerre. rcsin obtained in distilling the essence of 

lavender, he had discovered that a sil- 
vered plate sensitised with iodine vapour could be impressed 
by a luminous image. By a happy accident, such as be- 
falls only him who deserves it, — because he has the gift of 
interpretation, — Daguerre one night left in a cupboard an 
impressed silver plate. Next morning he was delighted to 
find that its image had risen to full visibility. Looking 
about for the cause of this good fortune, he noticed a dish 
of mercury on the shelf where the plate had stood. He at 
once suspected the mercury to be the "developer," for he 
knew that even at ordinary temperatures this metal gives 
off vapour. A simple test confirmed his suspicion; there 
and then was estabHshed the photographic art of '' develop- 
ment," an art with generous rewards for taste as well as skill. 
Development as the work of heat was known long before 
the time of Daguerre. The chemists of the middle ages 
were ingenious enough to make an ink which stained the 
paper no more than water as it left the pen; on warming 
the inscribed tablet before a flame its secret message 
sprang into full legibility. In a mode much more difficult 
to follow, light has effects of the sam6 kind. It often 
works a chemical change unaccompanied by alteration of 
hue, but let the photographed surface be bathed in the 




Plate VII. 



JOSEPH NICEPHORE NIEPCE. 



DIVISION OF LABOR 275 

right developer, and a further rearrangement of molecules 
sets in, this time with so marked a change of colour that an 
image emerges to view. A sketcher cannot delegate to 
any other hand than his own a single line or stipple of his 
drawing; the whole task is strictly and personally his own. 
In the fact that the development of a negative may be in- 
trusted to other hands than those which seize an impres- 
sion there enters a facility wholly new in representation. 
Its work now falls into that division of labour which has 
so much economised effort in other fields of toil. In many 
cases the task of development requires less skill than the 
taking of a picture, and in all cases it can be pursued at 
leisure and without the difficulties of place as well as time 
which may so severely harass the photographer afield. 

From its foundation the photographic art has kept in 
the main to two distinct paths. The one was pioneered 
by Niepce, whose plate coated with asphalt was hardened 
by the touch of light, so that a solvent left behind it an 
image in low relief. The second path, due to Wedgwood 
and Fox-Talbot, avails itself of the changes of colour 
wrought by light as it rearranges a chemical compound. 
In the roll of photographic honour Fox-Talbot takes rank 
immediately next to Niepce and Daguerre. To him we 
owe a refinement which effected the first notable reduction 
in the time required for photography. He immersed his 
paper in a solution of common salt, and then on one side of 
the sheet applied a solution of silver nitrate. This resulted 
in the formation of a silver chloride much more expeditious 
in its action than those salts formed as the nitrate combines 
with the sizing of the paper. In respect to beauty, the 
pictures of Daguerre and Fox-Talbot remain to show us 
how an art may spring in a single bound to admirable 
qualities. Yet, after the first flush of enthusiasm regarding 
the new solar pictures, there succeeded inevitable and just 
criticism of their defects. 



CHAPTER XX 

TRUTH OF FORM— THE TRANSLATION AND 
REPRODUCTION OF COLOUR 

THE lenses of the first cameras were guilty of serious 
distortions of form : the image of a cube seemed the 
portrait of a warped and shrunken cake of soap ; the pro- 
truding hands and feet of a sitter were 
Accuracy of Form, exaggerated to gigantic proportions. A 
succession of mathematicians and mas- 
ters of optics, from Petzval to Ross, Zeiss, and Goerz, have 
so improved the curves of these lenses, so spaced them 
apart, so balanced their divergencies in refractive and dis- 
persive quality, as to leave nothing to be desired that is 
feasible with respect to form. Substance as well as shape 
has profitably engaged a band of investigators of whom 
the chief is Dr. Schott of Jena. His first trials were in 
adding barium sihcate to the usual ingredients of glass, 
importing a refractive and dispersive power new in the 
glass-maker's art, and producing a very flat field with 
sharp definition. From among the combinations of lenses 
now offered the artist and the amateur, they may choose 
apparatus suited to portraiture, to interior views, or to 
landscapes, confident of approaching truth in their results 
so closely that the divergence from it is imperceptible.^ 

1 R. S. Cole's Treatise on Photographic Optics, London and New York, 
1899, is an authoritative work, fully illustrated, and giving mathematical 
formulae. 

276 




Plate VIII. 

LOUIS JACQUES MANDE DAGUKRRE. 
Retouched from an injured original daguerreotype in the U. S. National Museum, Washington. 



ILLUSION OF RELIEF 277 

The camera itself has undergone improvement not less 
remarkable than the rectification of its lenses. In its first 
estate it was so heavy and delicate as to be moved with 
difficulty and risk. With rare exceptions, its objects had 
to be brought before it, with serious restrictions of range. 
The first successful camera in hght and portable form was 
devised by Mr. Kinnear, an English amateur. The popu- 
lar instruments of the bellows and folding types are de- 
rived from apparatus invented by Mr. W. J. Stillman, in 
1867. It is because the camera, whether portable or not, 
has the utmost possible precision that we find it united 
with the telescope, the spectroscope, and the microscope, 
with the happiest issue, as we shall shortly see. A camera 
with accurate lenses not only enables an operator to per- 
form old tasks with unwonted facihty: it confers upon him 
powers wholly new. Let us begin by noting his novel pro- 
duction of the illusion of relief, and then pass to the camera's 
facility in changing the proportions of a picture. 

The stereoscope is the child of accurate photography. 
Provided with two views which have the same slight differ- 
ence as those received by the two eyes 
of an observer, it fuses them with the The illusion of Relief, 
perfect semblance of solidity. The 
"Laocoon" and the "Apollo" of the Vatican, the sublime 
elHpse of the Colosseum, the quaint thoroughfares of Siena, 
Avignon, and Toledo, return to the traveller's eye in vivid 
relief as he sits in his arm-chair at home and turns the axle of 
a stereoscope. Very few painters can put upon their canvases 
the suggestion of solidity offered by these simple pictures. 
To ask such illusion at the hands of a draughtsman were 
vain. Through the camera a unique bridge is here thrown 
between graphic and plastic art. As if by magic, a flat 
piece of paper rises to the three dimensions of life, and 
simulates admirably the masterpieces of a Phidias, a 
Michelangelo, a Thorwaldsen. 



278 PHOTOGRAPHIC TRUTH OF FORM 

Because its images may be considerably enlarged with- 
out blurring, or loss of detail, photography bestows a new 
resource upon both science and art. 

Dimensions Easily SHdcs of a sizc that may be readily 
Varied. slipped into the pocket, and much too 

minute in their details for execution by 
the pencil, bear pictures which survive in precision the 
exaggerations of the stereopticon, and play no minor part 
in the instruction and entertainment of the time. To cite 
a noteworthy case : every winter the great hall of the 
American Museum of Natural History, in New York, is 
thronged with audiences attracted by illustrated recitals of 
travel, of exploration, of recent advances in science. A series 
of these lectures of particular importance is conducted by 
the Department of Public Instruction of the State of New 
York, and is directed by Professor A. S. Bickmore. Here 
many of the lecturers are men of science who take part in 
expeditions for the express purpose of informing their au- 
diences about the most interesting regions of their own 
country and of the world. Because photographic duplica- 
tion is a matter of but trifling expense, these lectures are 
repeated in more than fourscore towns and cities of the 
United States and Canada, chiefly, of course, in the State 
of New York. Every considerable museum on the globe, 
whether of geology, natural history, or fine art, now pieces 
out the story of its specimens with a collection of sterling 
photographs. On occasion these furnish slides for the stere- 
opticon as a means of illustration impossible before to-day. 

Not seldom the bold enlargements of the lantern effect 
a brilliant revelation. Hermann Grimm, in the Deutsche 
Rundschmt for June, 1893, gave an account of the won- 
derful effects eHcited by the stereopticon as a means of 
teaching the history of art. No other form of reproduc- 
tion seems to him so well qualified to bring out the essential 
features of a great painting or etching as this. Permitting 



REVELATIONS OF ENLARGEMENT 279 

one, as it does, to enhance the proportions of a work at 
will, it brings every line under the closest scrutiny, and thus 
renders to the student the service which 
the naturaHst derives from the micro- The Lantern as a 
scope. But in some cases the aid of the Reveaier. 

stereopticon goes yet further. Some 
works of art, which in the artist's imagination were conceived 
in colossal dimensions, he was prevented from carrying out 
in their appropriate grandeur. Upon these the lantern 
confers their true proportions. Grimm illustrates this in 
a conclusive way by an analysis of the principal works 
of Diirer, Holbein, and Rembrandt. Diirer's " Knight, 
Death, and Devil," for instance, is known to us through 
an engraving a few inches in height. This Grimm threw 
upon the screen, and at once it loomed up before him in 
such overwhelming statuesqueness that it was perfectly 
clear that here was the form in which Diirer's mind origi- 
nally harboured the conception, to execute which in its 
adequate dimensions he found, however, no opportunity. 
When, in like manner, the " Passion," the " Apocalyptic 
Visions," and the '' Adoration of the Trinity " were cast 
upon the screen, they seemed to expand and blossom out 
into fuller life. The work last named at once took its 
place by the side of Raphael's " Disputa." Grimm says: 
** It was a new experience for me thus to see Diirer's 
works at once enlarged and simplified. The master stood 
before me as one redeemed. It seemed to me as though 
his pictures for centuries had been held in prison, and were 
only now freed and permitted to appear what they really 
are."i 

With lenses reversed the precision of photography be- 
stows another, if less striking, benefit upon the artist. We 

^ The Little Passion of Albert Diirer, with an introduction by Austin Dob- 
son, was published by George Bell & Sons, London, 1894. Its reproductions 
might all be enlarged with the effect remarked by Hermann Grimm. 



28o PHOTOGRAPHIC TRUTH OF FORM 

have only to hold an opera-glass wrong end to the eye at a 
theatre to see the roughly executed scenery take on all the 

delicacy of a miniature. On this help- 
Pictures in Miniature, ful principle an illustrator dashes off a 

sketch in wash or crayon on a sheet of 
large size, leaving the camera to reduce and refine his 
broad effects for the printing-block. Both the illustrations 
and the manuscripts of the Century Dictionary were 
brought by photography to microscopical proportions in 
order that copies might be sent to three separate deposi- 
tories as a safeguard in case of fire. Another dictionary, 
originally printed in large type, has been cheaply repro- 
duced in editions of less ample form by means of the 
camera, dispensing with the services of both compositor 
and proof-reader. Ever since the days of Solomon it has 
been lamented that of making books there is no end. 
With a diminution to a diameter of 20V0, and correspond- 
ingly to an area of 4;ooi;oo"o> it would be easy to carry 
away the National Library at Washington in one small 
volume. This reducing power of photographic lenses has 
had ingenious applications in war. During the siege of 
Paris in 1871, the London Times published every day 
a page of advertisements and news for residents of the be- 
leaguered city. This page, contracted by photography to 
a diameter of one eight-hundredth part, printed upon 
tissue-paper, and rolled within a quill, was intrusted to 
carrier-pigeons. On their arrival in Paris an enlarging 
camera brought once more to legibility the messages of 
the newspaper. 

The applications of the camera to the microscope have 
been remarkably gainful. When, however, the magnifica- 
tions exceed looo diameters the production of satisfactory 
photographs has always been a matter of some difficulty. 
Mr. J. E. Barnard and Mr. T. A. B. Carver have suc- 
ceeded in producing photomicrographs up to 5000 diam- 



THE ENGRAVER INTERPRETS 281 

eters by using a simple form of hand-fed arc-lamp. Its 
intense light has two pre-eminent advantages: it proceeds 
from a surface so small as to be virtually 
a point, and from this surface the rays Application to the 
stream forth in a perfectly even illumina- Microscope, 

tion. A brief account of this happy alli- 
ance of electrical and photographic devices appeared in 
Nature, Vol. LVII, p. 449. It is accompanied by two 
illustrations, in neither of which is there the shghtest de- 
centration so common when the oxyhydrogen light is 
employed. With moderate magnification and a quick 
plate, more than one investigator has revealed the inner 
structure of snow crystals, with hints for the study of 
other crystals easily deposited from various solutions. 

In addition to its distortions of outline the early photo- 
graph suffered from another grave fault — untruth in its in- 
terpretation of colour. The violets of a 
nosegay were as if white, the buttercups Translation of colour 

, . . 1 • 1 11 1 1 1 i"to Black and 

and geraniums quite as decidedly black. white. 

A good engraver, like Miller, when he 
interprets in black and white a canvas by Turner, takes 
pains to preserve the values of the colours, and suggests to 
the best of his ability the hues of the palette in the lines 
of his burin. The various colours of the spectrum affect 
the fibrils of the retina very differently from their action on 
the silver salts first used in photography. If the chemical 
theory of vision be true, the retinal surface is built up of 
compounds remote indeed in character from those which 
were originally used by Daguerre, Fox-Talbot, and their 
confreres. Red and violet rays, as they enter the eye, 
have much the same activity, and yield sensations differing 
but little in strength. But as long ago as 1777, Scheele, 
a Swedish chemist, found that violet light has eighty times 
more effect upon silver chloride than red rays. The pho- 
tographer, therefore, was loudly bidden so to vary and 



282 COLOUR IN THE CAMERA 

modify his chemicals as to reduce, or even aboHsh, the 
immense disparity between his eye and his plate in their 
responsiveness to the gamut of colour. In this difficult 
enterprise, as often before and since, the flower success 
grew from what appeared to be a seed of failure. 

When an unreflecting man finds an undesired property 
in the thing he works with, he simply casts that thing 
aside and thinks no more about it. To 
A Lesson from Failure, an invcntivc mind this very property 
may suggest a new use for which a 
substance, faulty in its first application, may be exactly 
suited, and the new utility may far overshadow the ser- 
vice required at first. When dyes from coal-tar, Peruvian 
bark, and oils began to be manufactured, they had a pro- 
voking way of fading out of their fabrics in a few days, or, 
under strong sunshine, even in a few hours. Usually, too, 
the more brilliant the tints, the more fleeting they proved. 
Their evanescence has been in large measure overcome, 
but before it yielded to the resources of research, a re- 
markable series of experiments took place ; for what is 
fading in sunshine but a plain advertisement of photo- 
graphic quality — a susceptibility to change of colour 
under the impact of light? 

In 1873 Dr. H. W. Vogel of Berlin observed that 
certain of his photographic plates had much more than 
ordinary sensitiveness to green rays, and he remarked that 
they were somewhat reddish in hue. Could it be possible 
that this accident of colour had given his films a new and 
most desirable sensibility? He at once procured some of 
the most fugitive dyes he could get— chinoline and pyridine 
dyes, red, violet, and blue. He found, to his dehght, that 
they entered into chemical combination with the salts of 
silver, conferring upon his plates a greatly heightened sus- 
ceptibility to rays which before had scarcely wrought any 
effect at all. A plate tinged with cyanin, a beautiful blue 




Plate IX. 
Red Rose, Yelt.ovv Tulip, and Violets The same on an Oktiiochromatic 
Photographed on an Ordinary Plate. Plate. 



ORTHOCHROMATIC PLATES 283 

dye, had surpassing sensitiveness to orange rays; stained 
with corallin, a compound red in colour, it took on in ad- 
dition a high impressibihty to greenish Hght. Each dye, 
let us note, rendered the plate responsive to the rays it 
absorbed — always complementary to the rays it reflected 
to the eye. 

Provided with an orthochromatic film, manufactured 
according to the Vogel method, a photographer may now 
take a picture of a variegated parterre, of October woods, 
of a lady in richly coloured costume, with a near approach 
to truth of interpretation. Despite the plate's improve- 
ment drawn from dyes, it may still continue to be too im- 
pressible by blue and violet rays. The remedy here is also 
due to Dr. Vogel, to whom the value of a red pane in the 
window of a '' dark room " had long been familiar in its 
interception of the intensely active blue and violet rays. 
In one of his early experiments he placed a dark-blue rib- 
bon on a piece of yellow silk ; interposing a yellow screen 
between these objects and the camera, he obtained a pic- 
ture in which the ribbon was dark and the silk was light — 
just as they appeared to the eye. To-day screens are 
manufactured in a wide variety of tones; they cut off the 
over-active rays during part of an exposure; then, for a 
moment, the screen is taken away and the blue and violet 
rays are at full liberty to imprint themselves. The ortho- 
chromatic plate is of particular value when gas- or candle- 
Hght is employed — comparatively poor in the more active 
luminous rays. The dyes at present used in the prepa- 
ration of orthochromatic plates are chiefly eosin, cyanin, 
azulin, erythrosin, azaleine, and croculein. Botany as well 
as chemistry has brought its sensitisers to the camera : so- 
lutions of the plantain and the blue myrtle have proved 
their power to correct the colour aberrations of the silver 
image. Plate IX shows two photographs of a red rose, 
a yellow tulip, and a few violets; the first photograph 



284 COLOUR IN THE CAMERA 

was taken with an ordinary plate, the second with an or- 
thochromatic plate. 

An oil-painting photographed on an ordinary plate is 
like a badly translated poem ; but little of its beauty sur- 
vives : but on an orthochromatic plate 
Aids to Art Study. the rendition is so just that for the 
first time in the history of art it is pos- 
sible to compare the masterpieces of the great painters. 
To-day a connoisseur places side by side in his cabinet a 
series of copies of Raphael, Velasquez, Titian, and Rubens, 
and, almost as if the original canvases were assembled 
under his eye, he is able to trace the development of each 
master's successive styles and understand the breadth as 
well as the distinction of his genius. For the great artists 
of Venice, Titian, Tintoretto, Carpaccio, and Gentile Bel- 
lini, whose works depend much more upon colour than 
line, the orthochromatic photograph is the first and, indeed, 
the only adequate reproduction. The most noteworthy 
photographer in this field is Mr. Domenico Anderson of 
Rome. *'Part of his extraordinary success," says Mr. Bern- 
hard Berenson, " comes from the fact that he always de- 
velops and prints his pictures himself, and, having a good 
artistic memory, he is able to bring out in them, by careful 
exposure, just the tone that best recalls the original." 
Reviewing the whole effect of such photography as this 
upon the data and the judgment of the connoisseur, Mr. 
Berenson adds : *' Printing itself could have had scarcely a 
greater effect on the study of the classics than photog- 
raphy is beginning to have on the study of the old masters." 
In a field far removed from that of fine art, the ortho- 
chromatic plate has peculiar value to the astronomer. In 
seizing the light from coloured stars in 
Aid to the Astronomer, the telcscopc, and in catchiug the hues 
of stellar spectra, it has notably ad- 
vanced his studies of the heavens. It is not, however, in 



THREE COLOURS ENOUGH 285 

any direct issue, but in affording an indirect means of re- 
producing colour, that the addition of dyes to silver salts 
bears.its richest fruit. 

In the ordinary printing of a coloured picture there is a 
metal block or a lithographic stone for every hue. A 
picture, if highly variegated, may require 
as many as twenty different blocks or colour Photography, 
stones, as it passes through the press, 
each imparting ink of a particular colour to the printed 
sheet. The modern analysts of light, beginning with Dr. 
Thomas Young, have pointed a way to a simpler method. 
He demonstrated, in 1802, that all the phenomena of colour 
may be explained by supposing that the retina contains 
three orders of nerves, each sensitive to waves of a certain 
length, that is, to a particular colour — red, yellowish green, 
or violet. He assumed that all other colours may be rec- 
ognised by exciting these nerves unequally. His theory 
received full confirmation at the hands of Professor Helm- 
holtz, equally great as an investigator in physics and in 
physiology. To Professor J. Clerk-Maxwell is due the 
suggestion that three plates, each inked with a fundamental 
colour, might replace the multiple series of the chromo- 
lithographer. 

From among the many attacks upon the intricate problem 
of reproducing colours by photograph}^, as based upon the 
three-colour process, it may suffice to choose two fairly 
typical examples — the first the method of composite heli- 
ochromy, devised by Mr. F. E. Ives of Philadelphia. With 
a camera of his own invention he takes three stereoscopic 
pairs of images, similar in appearance to ordinary uncoloured 
lantern-slides, but which, by differences in their light and 
shade, represent the proportionate distribution of the re- 
spective three primary colours in the object photographed. 
The three negatives are usually taken on a single plate at 
one exposure. The positive is made by contact-printing 



286 



COLOUR IN THE CAMERA 



in the usual way ; the glass plate is then cut in three and 
mounted on a special hinged frame, designed to bring the 
respective pairs of images into position in the kromskop 
(*' kromskop " is '* chromoscope " phoneticised). In the 
daytime the kromskop is used in front of a window illumi- 
nated by the light of the sky. At night, or where light from 
the sky is not available, two Welsbach burners, suitably ar- 
ranged, are employed. 

The construction of the kromskop is outlined in Fig. 84. 
Af B, and C are red, blue, and green glasses, against which 
^ the corresponding 

\ images of the 

\^^^:^ colour record are 

placed. D and E 
are transparent 
reflectors of col- 
oured glass. F 
represents the 
eye-lenses for 

magnifying the 
image. Beyond 
(7 is a reflector for 
illuminating the 
images at C — 
those at A and B 
being illuminated 
by direct light 




Fig. 84. 
Ives's Kromskop. 



from above. The operation of the instrument is as fol- 
lows : The green images are seen directly, in their position 
at C, through the transparent glasses D and E. The blue 
images are seen by reflection from the surface of the glass 
E, which makes them appear to occupy the same position, 
and in fact to become part of the images at C. In the same 
way the red images are seen by reflection from the surface 
of the glass D, and also appear to form part of the images 



COLOUR AND RELIEF UNITED 287 

at C. And finally, the eye-lenses at i^ not only magnify, but 
cause the eyes to blend the two images which constitute the 
complete stereoscopic pair, as in the ordinary stereoscope. 
The result is a single image, in solid relief, with the closest 
approach to natural colours yet attained by art. In an, 
ordinary photograph we plainly see that the gamut of light 
and shade is much narrower than in nature, — the picture 
is relatively too flat in the high lights, and wanting in detail 
in the deep shadows, — and for this defect the eye learns to 
make due allowance. The same fault extends to the Ives 
picture : its colours at times appear somewhat bleached 
out in the hghter shades, and seem too dull in the shadows. 
This defect is not noticeable in some reproductions, but 
seriously detracts from the beauty of others. An ordinary 
stereoscopic picture, with its lack of colour, looks more like 
a clay model than anything else. Endowed with the hues 
of the kromskop, it stands forth with an actuality that 
marks the highest reach of photographic skill. Mr. Ives 
has invented a lantern for the projection upon a screen of 
his three images, which combine with exquisite effect both 
in colour and in the illusion of relief. 

The printer's method is distinct from that of Mr. Ives. 
Three plates, each prepared so as to respond to a single 
fundamental hue, are in turn exposed to a camera's image 
of a coloured object, and from each negative a positive is 
produced in the ordinary way, and forms a plate to be 
inked in the press with a pigment of fundamental colour. 
It is in obtaining pure and appropriate pigments that the 
printer meets with his chief difficulty; often a particular 
enamel, rug, tapestry, or oil-painting is reproduced with 
a happy approximation to truth, and then the next attempt 
proves a failure because the combination of tints is not 
well matched in the printing of the three inks. It is worth 
noticing, as we pass, that in some three-colour processes 
the hues chosen are red, yellow, and violet-blue — yellow 



288 COLOUR IN THE CAMERA 

taking the place of the green selected by Young and Helm- 
holtz. With whatever choice of colours, this is assuredly 
a roundabout way of making a rainbow paint itself, but 
the direct transcriptions of colour due to Becquerel and 
Lippmann, admirable as they are, have all the limitations 
of the daguerreotype — they do not lend themselves to 
duplication. 

The most satisfactory means of laying hold of colour, as 
well as of translating it into black and white, seems to lie 
in the adoption of dyes once worthless from their fugitive 
quality. When German chemists a few years ago sought 
to dye silk and wool permanently with certain coal-tar 
compounds, was it not a piece of rare good fortune that 
they failed? When the first silver plate all too eagerly 
yielded to the violet ray, preferring it so much to its com- 
panion rays, there was exasperation for the printer in black 
and white, but there was hope for the artist who would 
recall the tints of the autumn woods, the procession of the 
flowers, the molten gold of the gates of sunset. This too 
active violet ray provoked the photographer into making 
plates with sensitiveness in better balance, and from them 
are directly descended the plates responsive to but one 
primary colour. Limitations mechanical and other attend 
the successful execution of three-colour illustration ; per- 
haps its best example has been reached in the pictures of 
Dr. W. J. Holland's Butterfly Book, wh^vQ textures as well as 
tints have been rendered with rare fidelity.-^ Plate I [frontis- 
piece) has been borrowed from that book. Such works are 
now issued at one-fourth the price that was common before 
the chemist, the electrician, and the printer enabled the 
photographer to offer tint as well as form in the offspring 
of his art. . 

If limning by indirection were ever to be accomplished, 
the eye of artifice had to see a thing as it is, without warp 

1 Published by the Doubleday & McClure Company, New York, 1899. 



THE CIRCLE ROUNDED 289 

or wryness. This duly attained, it was next needful to 
bring the photographic plate to the same responsiveness, 
colour for colour, as that of the retina whose office it would 
rival. This, too, was done, with the singular outcome that 
not only does the pencil of the sketcher and the draughts- 
man know a competitor, but so also does the brush of the 
painter, notwithstanding the variegation of his palette. 



CHAPTER XXI 

SWIFTNESS AND ADAPTABILITY— THE DRY PLATE— A 
NEW WORLD CONQUERED 

THE first photographs not only left much to be desired 
in recalling form and colour, but made undue de- 
mands upon time. For the impressions shown by Niepce 
to the Royal Society in 1827, exposures 

Time Reductions, of six hours wcrc ncccssary. This was 
much longer than an artist with his pen- 
cil or brush would have required. Daguerre, twelve years 
later, reduced the time demanded to thirty minutes; yet 
this improvement did not permit him to pass from land- 
scapes to portraits, and at first he did not deem his process 
suited to portraiture at all. It was Dr. John William 
Draper who first took a portrait with a camera — that of his 
sister, Miss Dorothy Catherine Draper — accomplishing the 
feat early in 1840, at the University of the City of New 
York, in Washington Square (Plate X). The lady is still 
living to show us that one long life may bridge the inter- 
val between the germination and the flowering of a great 
art. 

Fox-Talbot, taking another tack from that of Niepce 
and Daguerre, sought to obtain pictures on paper instead 
of on metal; and paper, because translucent, lent itself to 
reproduction as " negatives." He made the capital dis- 
covery that gallic acid produces upon the salts of silver, 
when slightly heated, precisely the same blackening effect 

290 




Plate X. 



COPY OF THE EARLIEST SUNLIGHT 

PICTURE OF A HUMAN FACE. 

Miss Dorothy Catherine Draper, taken by her brother, Professor 

John William Draper, early in 1840. 



TEN SECONDS ENOUGH 291 

as does light. Using this acid as a developer, he was able 
to shorten the exposure needed for his " calotype " to 
three minutes. To this day the derivatives of gallic acid 
maintain their value in the developing-room, against the 
rivalry of many new compounds. 

The next step forward was taken by St. Victor, a 
nephew of Niepce, who employed glass as a support in- 
stead of paper or metal, coating it with a thin layer of 
sensitised albumen. He thus effected not only a shorten- 
ing of time, but a gain in convenience and adaptability 
which revolutionised the art of photography. The trans- 
parency of glass gives one a negative incomparably supe- 
rior to that of any merely translucent material. Keeping 
to the path broken by Daguerre, John Frederick Goddard, 
in 1840, exposed an iodised silver plate to the vapour of 
bromine. He was able forthwith to take an impression 
upon it in twenty seconds — the greatest feat in time re- 
duction attained by any early inventor in photography. 
To Le Gray and Scott Archer are due the supplanting of 
albumen by collodion films, which gave results of new deli- 
cacy and beauty. By 1854 the collodion process had 
driven every other from the field and brought down the 
time limit to ten seconds. The preparation of these films 
required two distinct operations — first, the flowing of a 
glass plate with collodion usually containing ammonium 
iodide, cadmium iodide, and cadmium bromide; second, 
the bathing this plate, when it had set, in a solution of sil- 
ver nitrate, that it might be sensitised. In 1864 Bolton 
and Sayce abolished the troublesome silver-nitrate bath 
by combining the sensitive silver salts with the collodion 
in its original manufacture. The rapidity of these plates 
was not, however, remarkable. 

With every successive shortening of exposure the range 
of the camera grew broader, portraiture became an amuse- 
ment for amateurs, and the professional operator no longer 



292 SWIFTNESS AND SCOPE 

dreaded such an annoyance as the blur due to a bud's un- 
folding while painting itself upon a slow plate. Armed 

with his collodion films, the photogra- 
The Gelatin Dry Plate, pher pauscd as if he had reached the 

summit of his art. He was really but 
crossing a temporary bridge. Among the photographers 
who refused to rest and be thankful was Dr. R. L. Mad- 
dox of Southampton, in England, whose objections to 
collodion plates were manifold. Their preparation, he 
said, was costly, slow, and hazardous; because they had 
to be used wet, they demanded the services of a skilled 
operator, while they were restricted to such brief impres- 
sions as might be received before the plate dried. With a 
view to finding something less troublesome than collodion. 
Dr. Maddox began a series of experiments with isinglass. 
Dissatisfied with its results, he turned to gelatin, uniting 
with it silver iodide such as he had been accustomed to 
combine with collodion. Just then he had been photo- 
graphing some laurels, and had made a rather poor picture. 
What could improve his imperfect plate? He remembered 
having heard that for foliage the bromides of silver are 
better suited than the iodides. To the bromides he forth- 
with resorted, increasing the quantity by degrees, and 
lessening that of the iodides. So marked at that point 
was his success that he decided to use the bromides alone, 
achieving results still more satisfactory. 

When, in 187 1, the first effective dry gelatin plate thus 
saw the light of day and took its impress. Dr. Maddox at 
once published his experiments. To some of the leaders 
in photography, professional and amateur, their promise 
was as clear as that of dawn. Mr. Charles Bennett of 
London, by warming the gelatin emulsion for days to- 
gether brought it to a sensitiveness and permanence which 
made it straightway a commercial as well as an artistic 
success. In 1879 Mansfield brought the emulsion to the 



TIME NOW SERVANT, NOT MASTER 293 

temperature of boiling water, and found that in less than 
an hour it had acquired the maximum of sensitive quality. 
A collodion wet plate demands an exposure of from ten to 
fifteen seconds ; a dry plate does its work in a tenth, a 
thousandth, or even a smaller fraction of a second. And 
yet collodion, from its finer texture, is capable of effects 
so delicate as to make the critic hope that its best quali- 
ties may yet be imported into a dry plate as rapid as that 
to-day composed of gelatin. In a narrow range of im- 
portant work, chiefly in the manufacture of printers' plates, 
collodion emulsions are still indispensable; in nearly every 
other department of photography their rival holds the 
field. As we note the successive uses of the dry plate, and 
observe how vastly it enlarges the scope of the camera, we 
shall see how eminent a place Dr. Maddox occupies among 
the great inventors who have made photography what it is. 
Beginning with a time limit of one second, the dry gela- 
tin plate has been so increased in sensitiveness that M. L. 
Decombe, of the Paris Academy of Sci- 
ences, has employed it to photograph control of the Time 
Hertz waves in less than the five-mil- Limit, 

lionth part of a second. A triumph such 
as this is to be credited to new accelerations in " develop- 
ing " — an art which reaches the tap-root beneath both 
physics and chemistry. To-day the photographer in the 
wide diversity of his plates, quick and slow, has complete 
control of the element of time, and his camera conse- 
quently enjoys unlimited adaptability. Let us note, too, 
the advantages of the dry plate as compared with its pre- 
decessor. It is always ready for use; it requires no 
troublesome liquid accessories; it can be placed in any po- 
sition ; it may have a backing, not of brittle glass, but of 
flexible celluloid ; it even dispenses with an operator — an 
impression may be had by the touch of a spring setting 
free an automatic mechanism. After an exposure lasting 



294 SWIFTNESS AND SCOPE 

but an instant, or protracted for hours, the plate may be 
developed at pleasure many months later. Endowed with 
this wealth of quality, the dry gelatin plate takes rank 
with the electromagnet, or with the optical lens to which 
it is itself joined, as one of the creative inventions which not 
only add to the capital of science and art, but also increase 
the rate at which its gains are heaped higher and higher. 
On the threshold of photography it was debated whether 
a pencil of Hght could work as rapidly as the pencil of art. 
By successive advances the camera has all but overcome 
the tyranny of time, and stretches its sway into dominions 
where the pencil and brush, however skilfully held, would 
have remained unexercised forever. 

Let us take a rapid glance at the camera, provided with 

dry plates, in the hands of the man of science afield. 

Were he restricted to pencil or brush. 

The Dry Plate Afield. Or CVCn tO the WCt platCS of the CoUo- 

dion process, he would suffer not only 
great loss of time, he would miss taking ninety-nine pic- 
tures out of every hundred that now fill his portfolio. In 
the whole sphere of ingenuity there is no happier case of 
initiation than the touch on a kodak that affords an impres- 
sion which, perhaps a year later, is completed as a picture. 
It is therefore as plain as its own daylight that, in its 
most ordinary applications, photography vastly multiplies 
the winnings of a trained observer; it does all that an ac- 
complished sketcher can do, and does it with unimpeachable 
accuracy, with a swiftness all but instantaneous. Mark its 
services to a botanist as he journeys in Colorado, or in the 
Canadian Northwest. While gathering specimens for his 
collection, he secures the portrait of a flower here, a shrub 
there, in the full flush of life, very different from the mum- 
mified remains entombed in the herbarium. Once more at 
home, his shdes, coloured to nature, transport metropolitan 
assemblies to new worlds of floral beauty. 



AIDS TO PLANT STUDY 295 

In labours less fascinating, but of higher claim, the stu- 
dent employs photography to compare the tissues of allied 
plants as diversified at the sea-level and on the mountain- 
top; as modified by the frosts of Alaska, or by the arid 
winds of Nevada; or, in an inspection still more intimate, 
to detect the formation of starch in a leaf as furthered by 
generous warmth and light. Botany has an economic side 
which is constantly kept in view. From the Departments 
of Agriculture at Washington and Ottawa, from experi- 
mental farms scattered throughout North America, many 
thousand seeds, cuttings, and saplings are distributed every 
year. It may be an apple from Russia, or wheat from 
Finland, that is portrayed as it grows — with unmistakable 
evidence of its thrift or failure. When the pictures are 
compared, much is learned as to the varieties best suited 
for severe climates, for sandy soils, for the quick produc- 
tion of timber, or a stout resistance to vermin. No pen- 
cil sketches could have the same perfect trustworthiness. 
In combating pests of all kinds, whether fungi, beetles, or 
flies, new methods are constantly devised, and nothing 
makes them so easily understood as a photograph. For- 
estry is to-day receiving a noteworthy impulse at the hands 
of Mr. Gifford Pinchot, forester of the United States De- 
partment of Agriculture at Washington. His bulletins 
derive attractiveness as well as value from illustrations due 
to the camera. He has in hand a photographic description 
of the forests of the United States, which is steadily ap- 
proaching completion. 

To the student of rocks the camera is every whit as 
useful as to the student of plants. It gives him prints, 
omitting no detail of dip or strike. It affords memoranda 
of cuttings and shafts which the engineer may be obliged 
to cover on the very day of their exposure. In the new 
education, geology and geography are studied together; 
the features of the earth, recognised as more than skin- 



296 SWIFTNESS AND SCOPE 

deep, are referred to the world forces age-long in activity 
whose surface manifestations they are. Accordingly, the 
geographer, as well as the geologist, seeks to be an adept 
with the camera. Particularly significant are photo- 
graphs of the effects wrought by torrential rain, by glacial 
action, by the rapid erosion due to sand-storms; all of 
them showing at work to-day the enginery which in the 
illimitable past has sculptured the earth from primeval 
chaos. To do this adequately it is necessary to take pan- 
oramic views, part by part. A camera is carefully levelled, 
its first plate is impressed, the camera is then revolved so 
that a second impression overlaps the first a little, and so 
on until the whole horizon is traversed. 

The land-surveyor, whose relations with the geographer 
are often those of a partner, especially in the exploration 
of a new country, has for years used a camera with lenses 
at once telescopic and photographic. These lenses are of 
a form which will cover an angular field of 60° without 
measurable distortion, and give uniform definition all over 
the plate. The pioneer in this branch of art was M. Beau- 
temps Beaupre, who began his labours more than fifty 
years ago. In the comparatively recent development of 
photographic surveying the leaders are Colonel Laussedat, 
the director of the Conservatory of Arts and Trades in 
Paris, and Mr. Bridges of London. Thanks to their skill, 
phototheodolites are now built with power to sweep a 
radius of four miles and more. In the preliminary surveys 
for a canal, or railway, the camera is much preferable to 
ordinary surveying instruments. It is often very difficult 
to determine beforehand how much mapping will be ne- 
cessary to give the engineer all the data for a choice among 
the various routes in his purview. The district may have 
to be revisited again and again to supply the requisite 
details, and most of them may prove useless in the 
end. But if the field has been intelligently photographed 




THE JUNGFRAU FROM THE HOHEWEG, INTERLAKEN, 
SWITZERLAND (SIXTEEN MILES DISTANT). 




Plaie XI. 
From Scribners' Magazine, October, iSgg. Copyright, iSgg, by Charles Scribner's Sons. 

THE JUXGFRAU FROM THE SAME STANDPOINT (SIXTEEN MILES 
DISTANT), TELEPHOTO LENS. 



THE SURVEYOR SECONDED 297 

there is no necessity to return in quest of incidental 
features. 

A noteworthy feat in the photographic survey of new 
country was accomphshed in 1893-94 by M. E. Deville. 
He succeeded in covering no less than 14,000 square miles 
of the Rocky Mountain territory of Canada, carrying his 
camera to the boundary of Alaska, over passes of uncom- 
mon difficulty. As the result of careful comparison he 
estimates that photography is but one-third as expensive 
as the old method of the plane-table, while much more 
expeditious. A remarkable map of the Canadian National 
Park, created by the telescopic camera, was exhibited at 
the Columbian Exposition in 1893. It was made up of 
twelve sheets, each comprising a view of about sixty-three 
square miles in area. 

Where mountain-peaks do not afford him an elevated 
outlook, a surveyor may leave the earth and betake him- 
self to a balloon. In a photograph secured 700 feet above 
Stamford Hill, ia London, the topographical features 
were defined much more sharply than would have been 
possible without the camera. 

Telephotography, in fields other than that of land-sur- 
veying, is now prosecuted with remarkable results. With 
lenses developed from those of an opera-glass, M. F. 
Boissonas of Geneva has taken a photograph of Mont Blanc, 
full of detail, at a distance of forty-four miles. This 
and many other striking pictures are reproduced by Mr. 
Thomas R. Dallmeyer in a work which describes one of 
the most attractive departments of photography.^ Mr. 
Dallmeyer shows us how much a telephotographic camera 
improves ordinary portraiture by its precision of perspec- 
tive. In many diverse walks of science this camera has an 
array of tempting gifts : it offers the geologist a minute 

1 Telephotography, by Thomas R. Dallmeyer. London, W. Heineman; 
New York, Longmans, Green & Co., 1899. 



298 SWIFTNESS AND SCOPE 

delineation of the stratification of cliffs far beyond the 
range of common lenses. The architect and the student 
of archaeology can readily secure pictures of carving and 
sculpture otherwise quite inaccessible, while large buildings 
may be photographed from such a distance that they will 
appear virtually as plans in elevation ; the naturalist, without 
alarming a rabbit in its form, or a grebe on its nest, may 
obtain a portrait of either in a most characteristic attitude. 
Mr. Dwight L. Elmendorf of New York has pursued this 
branch of art with uncommon success. Plate XI is re- 
produced from illustrations which accompanied his article 
on '* Telephotography " in Scribners' Magazine, October, 

1899- 

Since the historic feats of Mr. James Glaisher, in 1862, 
— which nearly cost him his life, — balloons have added 
much to the data of meteorology. An elevation of a 
single mile often reveals strong aerial currents unfelt at 
the surface of the earth, and which give warning of an ap- 
proaching storm. But a balloon is costly and hard to 
manage ; for many purposes, even to a height of two miles, 
a well-built kite is equally serviceable, especially when 
fitted with appliances both electric and photographic. In 
the application of kites to answering the questions of the 
meteorologist, the place of honour is held by Mr. A. Law- 
rence Rotch, of the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory, 
near Boston, Massachusetts.^ 

1 Mr. Rotch writes (under date of December 9, 1899) : " I have just re- 
ceived my automatic kite-camera from the maker, M. L. Gaumont of Paris. 
Its design is based upon that of the much larger camera constructed for M. 
Cailletet in order to photograph from a balloon the ground vertically beneath, 
so that by reference to a scale-map the height as well as the drift of the balloon 
might be determined. The present apparatus is intended to photograph the 
upper surfaces of clouds, and may also serve to make a map of the country over 
which it passes. As it is intended to be lifted by kites its weight is but six pounds. 
It is contained in a box about six inches cube, and will be suspended vertically 
below the balloon. There are three clock movements : the first operates the shut- 
ter of the objective ; the second controls the operation of view-taking (which is 




Phofoi^raphcd by W. E. Cc, 

PiKA, OR Little Chief Hare. 



in of New J 'ork. 




I'LATi; X! 



Copyright by George Shir as, jrd, iSg8, 

Deer Photographed at Night. 
TYPICAL PHOTOGRAPHS OF LIVE ANIMALS. 



HUNTSMEN OF A NEW TYPE 299 

The simplicity and celerity of the camera give it ines- 
timable value to the naturalist or the physiologist. It en- 
ables him to follow day by day, even 
hour by hour, the development of a Gifts to the study oi 
bacillus, a mollusc, or a chick. He ^^^^' 

might, if quick and skilful with the 
pencil, draw a portrait or two for his note-book, but how 
could he find time and opportunity to sketch a hundred? 
In exploration it provides him with an instant means of 
depicting an insect, a reptile, or a bird in its home sur- 
roundings — perchance in the very act of seizing its prey. 
Mr. Cherry Kearton, the Enghsh naturalist-photographer, 
has shown us what prowess joined to skill can do in catch- 
ing glimpses of sea-birds perched on crags which, to wing- 
less man, are perilous in the extreme. Mr. WiUiam E. 
Carlin of New York, with equal enthusiasm, has secured 
portraits of the very shyest quadrupeds of the Rockies ; 
his picture of the pika, or little chief hare, is of unexam- 
pled rarity (Plate XII). Taking another path, Mr. George 
Shiras III of Pittsburg has sought out wild deer which, 
for the most part, feed and drink at night. His photo- 
graphs, taken by flash-light, are among the best ever added 
to the portrait-gallery of natural history (Plate XII). 

Physicians find the camera an important means of regis- 
tering the course of a malady and of studying its treat- 
ment, the pictures easily lending 
themselves, furthermore, to class-room From the Field of 

, -r , . , . , Health to the Bed- 

inStrUCtlOn. JNO student Ot bacteriology side of Disease. 

to-day considers himself fully equipped 

for study until he has reached the mastery of a camera ; 

for his " cultures," microscopic as they are in size, would 

regulated before the camera leaves the ground, the period being intended to 
vary from ten minutes to two hours) ; the third is charged with turning the 
roll of three-inch film. The time between successive exposures may be any 
period from three to nine minutes." 



300 SWIFTNESS AND SCOPE 

demand the rarest aptitude to be accurately sketched. 
At times the instrument may be discarded while its 
chemicals are retained for direct use. The physiologist, in- 
jecting silver salts into nervous tissue, is rewarded by a 
series of blackened branchings, each telHng a hitherto un- 
told story of structure and function. 

The camera sees much where the eye sees nothing, be- 
cause the photographic film is impressible by many kinds 
of light that are without effect on the retina. In Ohio, 
a few years ago, a lawsuit was decided when the fifth sig- 
nature to a will, otherwise undecipherable, came out 
clearly in a photograph. A skilful use of the same subtile 
vision brings to light the first inscription committed to 
ancient parchments — the writing all but completely erased 
for a second use of the vellum. The gaze of a camera has 
been turned upon an adult puma, and at once the spots 
which, to unaided sight, disappeared in its youth, came forth 
plainly on the sensitive plate. A case of smallpox may 
in like manner be detected by its blotches showing them- 
selves in a photograph long before they are discernible to 
the eye. 

It is a curious fact that the improvements which make 

the camera at once small and speedy in action place a new 

facility in the hands of the anthropolo- 

Aboriginal Portraiture, gist — that Studcnt of man, UOt aS an 

assemblage of tissues, but as a bundle 
of primitive traits, habits, and customs. The informed 
traveller among the remaining aborigines of the world is 
anxious about their impending disappearance, not merely 
by the sword or through disease, but by a semi-civilisa- 
tion not less fatal to their best traditions in art and in- 
dustry. From superstitious or other fear, the native in 
many parts of America, Africa, and Australia has an un- 
conquerable aversion to having his portrait taken. Says 
Mr. E. F. im Thurn: ''Instantaneous and secretly taken 



ABORIGINES PORTRAYED 301 

photographs are best, as savages are usually afraid to be 
photographed. A Carib of Guiana, when in Georgetown, 
looks cowed and miserable; in the country, at home, he is 
a manly and attractive chap." Photography is doing no 
worthier work in the world than when it thus catches every 
surviving relic of savage and barbaric life. That the New- 
Zealanders are aHve to this question of depicting aborigi- 
nal art is evident in a note from Mr. A. Hamilton of the 
University of Otago, Dunedin (dated August 3, 1899): 
" I am photographing all the carvings and similar relics 
'that remain in New Zealand, and obtaining representations 
by photography of social arts, such as planting food-crops, 
weaving, fire-making by friction, and so on. Some of 
these will be published in my book on Maori Art, now 
in its fourth part, issued at the expense of the New Zea- 
land Institute, Wellington. I am also forming for the in- 
stitute a record collection of all the photographs that I can 
get from European and other museums of the Maori arti- 
cles in their collections." 

Whether a savage resembles our ancestors or differs 
from them, equally instructive is a full portrayal of the man 
himself, of his response to the needs of sustenance, shelter, 
and war, his attempts, often admirable, at decoration and 
the symbolism of religion. We are wont to mourn the 
species of birds and beasts that have disappeared forever 
before the sportsman and the plume-seeker. But how much 
poorer is the world for the loss of such a tribe of men as 
that which, about a century ago, became extinct on the 
Easter Islands, leaving behind writing of great beauty as a 
token of their high rank in art and intelligence! Even 
from an economic point of view, native industries, such as 
those of the American Indians, richly repay study. The 
shawls and blankets, the baskets and pottery, in the Na- 
tional Museum at Washington are not simply a feast for 
the eye: they have golden hints for the manufacturer. 



302 SWIFTNESS AND SCOPE 

These aboriginal masterpieces deserve to be accurately re- 
produced in colours, not only to give delight to the world 
around, but to enrich the repertory of every thoughtful 
designer. 

The traveller and the explorer, whether they be men of 
science or not, owe much to the gelatin plate, which defies 
climatic stresses, however severe. A few years ago it was 
a matter of great difficulty to secure en route good nega- 
tives on collodion films. Often when the photographer 
reached home he found, to his chagrin, that his plates were 
worthless. To-day Mr. Peary easily obtains excellent pic- 
tures in the arctic regions, while scenes in tropical Africa 
and South America are photographed with equal perfection, 
their extremes of climate exerting no effect upon the plates 
employed. 

The ease and quickness of the camera open to it a wide 

field in picturing the progress of work too rapid or too 

complicated for the pencil. A large 

Pictures in Series, and g^^up of coustructors— engineers, archi- 

New Revelations. tects, ship-buildcrs — dcHve help from 
the photographs readily taken day by 
day, which explain in the clearest manner the erection of 
a bridge, a steel office building, or an armoured cruiser. 
With the sam.e invaluable aid a landscape-gardener, a for- 
ester, or an expert in irrigation, may follow in his city office 
the prosecution of his various plans nearly as well as if he 
were supervising a single task, and on the ground in per- 
son. In a foundry or a machine-shop the pictures taken 
during an important casting, or an elaborate piece of engine 
construction, enable it to be duplicated at any future time, 
there or elsewhere, with much aid to beginners, with much 
useful refreshing of memories on the part of their seniors. 

The engineer, discarding the pencil for the camera, 
draws upon the physicist for a gainful loan, with the result 
that he learns much in the field of design and experiment. 



LIGHT AS A DETECTIVE 303 

Borrowing his polariser, a simple instrument which brings 
light to a single plane of vibration, he uses it as a searcher. 
A change in the inner structure of glass, though due to 
but moderate pressure, may be detected in altering the re- 
frangibility of a beam . of .polarised light. The inventor 
who thinks that he has devised a truss, or a girder, of 
new efhciency has, therefore, only to construct a model in 
glass to bring his plan to an inexpensive test. A beam of 
polarised light sent through the glass will plainly show to 
the eye, and register in the camera, the distribution and 
extent of the strains imposed by a moving load. In like 
manner a piece of glass which has been imperfectly 
annealed at once declares its weakness, so that it may be 
excluded from chemical uses or mechanical pressures likely 
to be too severe for it. The lenses of large telescopes, as 
moved through wide variations of angle with the horizon, 
are subjected to severe strains. It is imperative, therefore, 
that they should be manufactured of thoroughly annealed 
glass. In the case of the thirty-six-inch telescope at Lick 
Observatory, nineteen discs of glass as tested by polarised 
Hght were rejected before a disc of satisfactory quality was 
found. The same subtile detective is yielding knowledge 
of the architecture of crystals, and, passing from the lab- 
oratory-table to the counter, it is busy separating false 
gems from real, and adulterants from food, drugs, and the 
raw materials of the spinner and the chemist. 

Aid to the navigator more ingenious still is proffered by 
Dr. C. Runge, who has much simplified the ascertainment 
of longitude, commonly a difficult task. 

He first photographs the moon, then, at Longitude Ascertained. 

intervals, bright stars or planets which 
come to the place where the moon appeared a few minutes 
before. From these pictures, accurately timed, the longi- 
tude can be computed with readiness from the data of the 
nautical almanac. 



304 SWIFTNESS AND SCOPE 

While the camera In its highest work may call forth all the 
mind and skill of a man of the eminence of Captain Abney, 
or Mr. Matthew Carey Lea, let the ordi- 
Amateur Illustrations, nary user of it be glad that in its every- 
day applications.it easily falls within the 
range of his judgment and adroitness. Thanks to the 
inventors who have simplified its form, reduced its size, 
improved its films, condensed its chemicals to tablets 
soluble at pleasure, and produced papers which may be de- 
veloped in ordinary light, the camera now supplements the 
pen in a dehghtful way. A young fellow leaves his home in 
New York to become a miner in Arizona. He writes to his 
friends, describing his new surroundings, and this he does 
graphically and well. But he manages *'to take them to the 
place," as the Scotch say, by a few snap-shots which show 
his cabin, the shaft in which he toils, the neighbouring 
cave with its array of stalactites and stalagmites ; while the 
force of the occasional rain-floods from the mountains 
overhanging the mine is depicted in the utter wreckage 
of a village street. Or it may be that this young fellow is 
sufficiently advanced in his fortunes to take a trip to 
Mexico. His note-book, as well as his letters, are en- 
riched in the most telling way by a camera no bigger than 
a cartridge-box. The sensitive plate, repeating what it 
sees, completes the description in words, and henceforth 
the young miner's friends in the distant East can imagine 
him just as he is — in a world to them almost as strange as 
if it were another planet. It is this new power to make 
others far away both in time and place see all that meets 
one's eye here and now, and this with the very minimum 
of skill or outlay, that gives photography a universality 
denied to the work of the pencil or the brush. To wield 
these acceptably, no matter what enthusiasts may say, re- 
quires both natural aptitude and judicious training. In the 
transference of impressions the kodak does thoroughly and 



THE AMATEUR'S AMPLE FIELD 305 

at once much that before photography demanded uncom- 
mon talent, and opportunities for the education of that tal- 
ent which were rarer still. 

When an amateur takes up a congenial field of photog- 
raphy, and patiently cultivates the portraiture of flowers, or 
birds, or aught else, he soon finds himself a well-informed 
student without intending it, an authority, perchance, and 
that in a domain which is certain to grow in its interest as 
he tills it longer and better. And he may do less than 
this and still be rewarded. Poor indeed is the holiday 
jaunt that cannot leave him reminders in picturesque bits 
of road, of woodland, or of brookside. From the brain a 
scene begins to fade the moment the eye ceases to rest 
upon it, but the camera has a memory that never forgets. 

If photography brings much of refined pleasure to the 
amateur, it owes not a little, in turn, to the men who have 
used the camera simply because they thoroughly liked its 
work. Some of the most valuable compounds used in 
photography, some of its best forms of apparatus, are due 
to the non-professional and non-professorial tenants of the 
dark-room. To investigators of the philosophical grasp of 
Mr. Lea and Captain Abney the sensitive plate has been 
a starting-point for researches in physics, chemistry, and 
optics, all brought to converge upon the modern triumphs 
of light as a limner. The supreme advantage of photog- 
raphy as an instructor is that experimental work is its very 
basis, and that results of some kind or other are always 
visible. 

It is often laid to the charge of the camera that it has 
dealt drawing a mortal blow — that the free-hand sketch is 
becoming more and more rare. Yet if 
the skill of the draughtsman is less in Pictorial Art. 
request than of old, it must be admitted 
that the quality of drawing has distinctly improved under 
the pitiless rivalry of the photograph. Bad drawing and 



3o6 SWIFTNESS AND SCOPE 

faulty perspective are tolerated no more, even when a 
good colourist displays them, for to-day everybody has 
been educated by the camera to require that creative art, 
no matter how high it may rise, shall nevertheless be 
grounded in truth of representation. In so far as the cam- 
era has displaced the pencil, where there is time and op- 
portunity for a sketch, the fact is of a piece with the 
unceasing encroachments of mechanism upon handicraft. 
Such supersedures make us, in the main, richer; but as 
new gains are heaped on our panniers they throw to the 
ground more than one golden heritage. 

It is a sound dictum of art that only those who draw 
ever really see, and if the task of hmning is transacted by 
machinery, much priceless education of the eye, the hand, 
and the brain is unquestionably missed. Wherever the 
camera has induced any one to lay down the pencil or the 
brush, who might have wielded it with power, it has done 
harm. But it is debatable whether very many souls that 
have felt the stirrings of creative faculty have ever allowed 
them to be cramped or stifled by photography. The irre- 
pressible skill of the sketcher is a possession of the few, 
the deftness of the camerist is for the many. 

The camera every day becomes a more and more im- 
portant means of bringing to the illustrator, the designer, 
the painter, the sculptor, the elements of their composi- 
tions. Beginning with sound and accurate representations 
of reality, the pencil proceeds to their idealisation, its suc- 
cess turning upon the extent, variety, and truth of the 
transcripts from nature. Just as a novelist like Scott, a 
poet like Tennyson, rises to imaginative flights all the 
more assured and convincing for his close and patient ob- 
servation of a pebbly beach, a curling breaker, so the eye 
quick to catch a hint in the ripple of a wave, the whorl of 
a fern, the trail of a vine, the sunbeam bursting from a 
cloud, can store a photographic note-book with a thousand 




Q 5 

h p. 



PICTORIAL PHOTOGRAPHY 307 

outlines for subsequent elaboration, often when there is 
neither time nor place for a pencil sketch, however rapid. 

Because observed and recorded truth gains ineffable 
charm when transmuted by the mind and soul of an artist, 
his works and those of the photographer occupy two dis- 
tinct worlds. Says Mr. Frederick Crowninshield : ** The 
greater the triumphs of photography over nature, the 
greater the necessity for the emphasis of the artistic quali- 
ties. Photography cannot by its graphic accuracy rout 
the born artist, who must be just as accurate in the ren- 
dering of his soul's images as the sensitive plate is in the 
glassing of nature's facts." And yet, while the spheres of 
fine art and of the camera thus remain apart, they touch 
each other at more points than one. Everybody who has 
seen the recent photographic exhibitions in Paris, London, 
and New York is aware that pictorial photography has 
lately taken a notable stride forward. Fetters that ten 
years ago seemed of iron rigidity have been relaxed in a 
remarkable degree. By dint of the widest play of chemi- 
cal experiment, by locally modifying the developing and 
printing processes, a new school of camerists have attained 
results of a value and beauty impossible in the days of the 
albumen print. The portrait of Charles Darwin by Mrs. 
Cameron, of Mr. Eickemeyer by his son, of Sir Edward 
Burne-Jones by Mr. Frederick Hollyer, together with the 
landscapes of Mr. Alfred Stieglitz and Mr. George Davison, 
show us the work of artists who have chosen to work with 
platinum and silver salts, when they might with success have 
devoted themselves to the pencil and the brush. ^ '' The 
West Wind" (Plate XIII), by Mr. J. Whitall Nicholson of 
Philadelphia, is an excellent example of a picture created by 
photography. ' 

iMr. Alfred Stieglitz has an illustrated article on " Pictorial Photography" 
in Scrihners^ Magazine, November, 1899. 

A capital paper on " The Relation of Photography to Art," by Mr. James 
Craig, appeared in the Photographic Times, June, 1899. 



3o8 SWIFTNESS AND SCOPE 

Mr. George G. Rockwood, the well-known photographer 
of New York, has recently perfected a simple mode of 
bringing the camera to the aid of a 
Photo-sculpture. sculptor as he creates a portrait in bas- 
relief. In a moderately lighted room he 
prepares a flat slab of clay, upon which is projected from a 
stereopticon a strongly illuminated portrait — just as in the 
ordinary illustration of a lecture. With this aid the mod- 
eller executes his task at a pace and with a verity of result 
not otherwise possible. A bas-relief of President McKinley, 
produced in this way, is life-like. 

In co-operation with a friend Mr. Rockwood has arrived 
at a method of producing small effigies, two inches or less 
in diameter, employing photography solely from first to 
last. The degree of relief obtained may be considerably 
higher than that of the coins of the United States. Any 
carefully modelled design or drawing may be used, and 
indeed anything whatever that can be well photographed. 
This singular and novel art has not yet been disclosed to 
the pubHc in its details. In its essence it takes advantage 
of a property for many years invaluable to the camerist — 
the solubility of bichromated gelatin as affected by ex- 
posure to Hght. This solubility, varying as it does with 
every degree of illumination from the shadows to the high 
lights of an image, enables that image to be registered in 
relief with an effect such as hitherto has been won only by 
protracted toil with the graver. 

As we noted in the last chapter, one of the worthiest 

tasks which can be assumed by either the amateur or the 

professional photographer is the repro- 

The Camera and the duction of the mastcrpicccs of fine art. 

Engraver. This, not SO loug ago, was the field of 

the engraver; to-day his skill is largely 

in demand, not for engraving, pure and simple, but for an 

alliance with photography. In a noteworthy case there is no 



AN ALLY OF LITERATURE 309 

rivalry between the burin and the camera, but instead only 
co-operation guided by the rarest skill and intelligence. 
The superb copies of Italian, Dutch, Flemish, and English 
paintings by Timothy Cole are produced from photo- 
graphed blocks upon which the colour values are carefully 
restored ; the artist then proceeds to engrave these blocks 
with the originals before him. 

At many points graphic art and literature join hands. 
The written like the spoken word, for all its power, has a 
limited dominion. Words cannot de- 
lineate a coast-line or a hill, repeat a a Handmaiden to 
sunset, or portray a human face. Pho- Literature, 

tography, the new and universal lan- 
guage, united to words, completes their meaning with the 
effect that the whole of truth is matched and told as never 
before. The worthiest fruitage of primitive picturing is 
undoubtedly the art of writing. Incalculable though the 
value of writing may be, and of its offspring printing, their 
characters have lost much in the conventions which make 
it impossible to detect the likeness of a thing in its name. 
Professor Scripture of Yale University in a series of tests 
has found reason to believe that the acquisition of a foreign 
tongue can be hastened threefold when pictures accom- 
pany the words. Comenius, two centuries ago, was one 
of the first teachers to add pictures to books. For nearly 
two hundred years the cost of illustration forbade anything 
but the most infrequent imitation of his example. To-day, 
thanks to photography, written language resumes its an- 
cient alliance with the picture. Every book the better for 
illustration is illustrated ; while the word spoken by the in- 
structor or the entertainer is as helpfully supplemented by 
the photographic slide. Among the instruments which 
give recorded science its new verity, the camera is one of 
the chief. 

The man of letters is an artist whose studio is the library, 



310 SWIFTNESS AND SCOPE 

who works with the pen instead of the brush. He, too, 
owes a weighty debt to the camera. It gives him, on 
nominal terms, facsimiles of the rarest printed books in 
the Bodleian Library at Oxford. In Mr. B. F. Stevens's 
reproductions of Manuscripts in European Archives Relat- 
ing to America, the foundations of American history are 
bared at the same moment to hundreds of students scat- 
tered throughout the world. The camera, too, convicts 
the forger of documents, or of manuscripts and books not 
less valuable, and serves to restore writing otherwise 
illegible through fading and wear. For contemporary an- 
nals the camera is all too generous. It is so prodigal of 
pictures as to be embarrassing. 

With this glance at the services of the camera to art and 
to letters, let us now turn to the tasks of the expert opera- 
tor who, in a special field of science, employs plates of 
uncommon qualities. 



CHAPTER XXII 

THE WORK OF QUICK PLATES— PHOTOGRAPHIC 
REPRODUCTION 

WHEN one looks out from a fast express train the 
sign-boards of the way-stations are quite illegible, 
the impressions formed by their letters are too brief for 
clear perception. Hence the disposal 
of generous breadths of flowers, shrubs, vision is siow. 
or gravel, so as to form "Melrose" or 
*' Spuyten Duyvil " fifty or a hundred yards away from the 
track, and clearly to be read in the swiftest running by. 
In nature as well as in art there is a world of motion which 
far transcends the narrow time limits of the eye's impressi- 
bility. Here, as in many another field, the camera enables 
us to see what otherwise were forever invisible. In the 
three-thousandth part of a second the sun has taken his 
own portrait, while the momentary phases of eclipses, solar 
and lunar, of planetary occultations and transits, have been 
seized by the dry plate in periods much too short for col- 
lodion, and, therefore, vastly too brief for the pencil of the 
sketcher. Dr. W. L. Elkin of Yale Observatory, by tak- 
ing simultaneous photographs of meteors with cameras 
remote from each other, has established their height as 
being forty-five to sixty-five miles from the earth. 

With plates all but instantaneous the operator catches 
the contour of a bar of maple or steel at the instant of rup- 
ture under strain, the details of an explosion, the path of a 

311 



312 QUICK PLATES 

rocket through the air. Lord Rayleigh, in the feat of 
photographing a bursting bubble, discovered that its col- 
lapse took place in the three-hundredth part of a second. 
The terrific power of air when rushing along as a tornado 
or cyclone has surpassed, until modern times, all means of 
measurement. Air to-day may be observed as it moves 
at a pace so far surpassing that of a tornado, or a cyclone, 
as readily to pierce the stoutest steel. From the photo- 
graphs of air-disturbances caused by flying shot, it seems 
that the missile never comes into immediate contact with 
the armour-plate which, nevertheless, is riven asunder. It 
appears that the hole for the passage of the shot is made 
by an envelope of air that surrounds the projectile and 
travels with it. Strangely enough, the splash of the shot 
as it strikes the steel armour closely resembles the splash 
of a marble dropped into milk. When nature draws her 
parallels the lines may be remote enough from each other ; 
and clearly does she teach us here that solids and liquids 
which seem distinct and apart are not so very different, 
after all. Given a projectile swift enough and the toughest 
steel moves before it Hke so much milk. 

The American pioneer in the quick photography of ani- 
mal motion was Mr. E. Muybridge, whose famous pictures, 
published by the University of Pennsyl- 
vania, portray horses walking^ and racing^ 

. . . . ^' The study of 

birds in flight, athletes jumping and Animal Motion, 
running. In extreme cases Mr. Muy- 
bridge's exposures lasted for only the soVo of a second. 
His photographic arrests of movements too swift for the 
eye have enabled Meissonier in France, and Remington in 
America, to revise their representations of animal motion — 
with variously criticised effect. If a visual perception, it is 
argued, lasts one twenty-fifth of a second, why not match 
it with a picture secured in a period not any shorter? 
Then, too, it is added, the brain builds up its impressions 



TOYS MAY SUGGEST MUCH 313 

of rapid motion from those phases which are frequently 
repeated. These, therefore, should be more dwelt upon 
as pictorial elements than phases comparatively rare. To 
this it may be responded that our notions as to the atti- 
tudes of animals fleeing or flying have been largely derived 
from conventional and untrue pictures, intended rather to 
please the eye than to inform the mind. As these inher- 
ited notions are corrected by the camera, the feeling that 
its deliverances are ugly wears off as we see that they 
stand, in part at least, not for inaccurate tradition, but for 
truth. ** Instantaneous " photographs show us that many 
of the Japanese bronzes of herons and hawks are not gro- 
tesques, as was thought by their first European and Ameri- 
can admirers, but are due to observation of attitudes too 
brief for any but the alert and disciplined eye of a Japa- 
nese modeller. 

Within the past few years some of the most eminent 
men in the ranks of science have returned to the playthings 
of their childhood, and, at first view, 
with some danger to their dignity, have philosophers Re-enter 
begun the serious study of the hoop, *^^ Nursery, 

the top, the bubble, and the kite. 
Strange to say, these simple objects have brought them 
to the limit of their powers, and they confess that much 
remains to be understood regarding the toys that for ages 
have amused the youngsters of every cHme. A boy four 
years old may notice that the quicker he trundles his hoop 
the likelier it is to stay upright, or, a little later in his 
round of sport, he may remark that the swifter his pace on 
a bicycle the better assured is his perch. Both, he will 
duly learn, are cases of the same law. A top in its com 
plex gyrations, especially in those of its *' dying down," 
requires many lengthy formulae to express the forces in 
play. 

More intricate still are the impulsions and checks which 



314 QUICK PLATES 

make the paths of a gyroscope a paradox to everybody 
but the mathematician. These paths attentively studied 
are found to explain orbits at the extremes of vastness and 
minuteness — those of the planets in the sky, those of the 
particles in a magnet. Children scarcely out of their long 
clothes manage to blow soap bubbles, and as the films thin 
out to fatal collapse the physicist gets a hint as to the di- 
mensions of a molecule, or as they belt themselves into 
mimic rainbows he reads the lengths of waves of light, or 
employs them to detect minute quantities of electricity. 
We smile when we hear that grown-up Chinamen amuse 
themselves at flying kites, but to fly kites as well as they 
do implies a good deal of uncommon observation. An 
accomplished kite-flier takes advantage of those upward 
streams of air that ordinary dwellers upon earth know little 
about — streams which enable heavy birds to soar without 
apparent effort. A toy sparrow sold for a dime is pro- 
pelled with muscles extemporised from a rubber band. 
Coil this rubber tightly and the bird will rise to a lofty 
ceiling. Let the scale of this achievement be successfully 
enlarged and the problem of man's reign in the air is solved 
forthwith. 

Nearly a century ago. Plateau, a Belgian physicist . of 

distinction, devised a toy worthy, from its significance as 

well as its amusing power, to have a 

Plateau's Toy the Germ placc of houour bcside the top, the hoop, 

of the Kinetoscope. ^^^ ^^^ j^-^^ ^-j^^ ^^^^^ ^^^^^ SUCCCSS- 

ful toy, this of Plateau's depends upon 
motion. In its famihar form his zoetrope, or wheel of Hfe, 
is a cylinder eight or ten inches in width, about seven 
inches high, and open at the top. Around the lower half 
of its interior is a series of pictures showing, let us say, 
a boy in the successive attitudes of a leap (Fig. 85). 
These pictures are looked at through narrow slits in the 
cylinder while it is revolved rapidly. Each visual impres- 




THE ILLUSION OF MOTION 315 

sion of a picture lasts the twenty-fifth of a second, and be- 
fore it has time to fade away there is superposed on the 
retina an impression from the next and 
but sHghtly different picture, and so on 
throughout the series. Because the im- 
pressions blend with one another, the eye 
seems to behold a boy in quick motion 
through the air. In the first zoetropes 
the pictures were roughly executed wood- 
cuts, not particularly well drawn. When 
these were replaced by a series of instan- Fig. 85. 

taneous photographs there was a much Zoetrope. 

better illusion of motion, and the toy of Plateau began to 
unfold its possibilities. 

Much remained to be desired in the portrayals of the 
zoetrope ; it did not enter the door that it opened. To 
Marey, Edison, and Lumiere are chiefly 
due the machines which gave the camera The Photochronograph. 
its mastery of motion — in addition to 
its preceding conquests of form, colour, and solid relief. 
Marey, in his photochronograph, has given his attention 
mainly to problems of science : he has demonstrated how 
a cat manages so to fall through the air as to alight on its 
feet ; he has analysed the movements of walking, running, 
and swimming.i In comparing the locomotion of man and 
the lower animals he has come upon more than one strik- 
ing similarity. The eel in the water and the adder on the 
ground move by undulations of precisely the same kind. 
When a tadpole's tail drops off, its hind feet move exactly 
as do the limbs of a human swimmer. The engineer, as 
well as the biologist, propounds questions of moment to 
the Marey machine. By means of its testimony, M. Des- 
landres has investigated the strains to which bridges are 
subject under a moving load. In one startling case he 

1 Movement. E. J. Marey. International Scientific Series. 



3i6 QUICK PLATES 

found that when the steps of a horse, harnessed to a car- 
riage, harmonised in rhythm with the natural vibrations of 
the structure, the deflection of a bridge became thirteen 
times as great as when the horse and carriage stood 
still. 

Strange stories come to us from Hindostan of a wizardry 
which plants a seed and obliges the stem to sprout, grow, 
blossom, and bear fruit, all in a few minutes. Photography 
displays an equal marvel, but substitutes seconds for min- 
utes. M. Mach, selecting a gourd of rapid growth, took 
pictures of it twice a day for fifty days, and when these 
pictures were combined, zoetrope fashion, they vividly re- 
called the history of the plant. Apart from the phenomena 
of growth proper, which were interesting enough, the leaves 
were seen to turn to the light in the most natural manner, 
while the relative repose of the later stages of maturing 
was clearly manifest. 

Edison, in devising the kinetograph, which takes his pic- 
tures, and the kinetoscope, through which they are viewed, 
has paved the way for researches quite 

The Kinetoscope. as fruitful as those of Marcy, but thus 
far his selection of subjects has been in 
the field of amusement rather than of instruction. The 
pictures of the kinetograph are taken at intervals of one 
forty-sixth of a second, the exposure lasting one-sixtieth 
of a second (Plate XIV). In such figures one gets an idea 
of the mechanical resources upon which rest the advances 
of modern photography. The images duly impressed on a 
narrow strip of celluloid, which resumes its journey 2760 
times a minute, are developed by carefully timed machin- 
ery. When such a strip is brought into the kinetoscope, 
and moved and halted at precisely the same intervals as 
those of its impress, the illusion of movement is irresistibly 
conveyed. By means of a stereopticon the pictures are 
thrown upon a screen with vivid effect, especially in recall- 




tm^ 



Plate XTV. 

EDISON KINETOGRAPHIC PICTURES. 
A dance. 



ECLIPSES REPEATED 317 

ing the swift motion of water — the dash of breakers against 
a cliff, the rush and tumult of the rapids and falls of Niag- 
ara, the ebullition and subsidence of a Yellowstone geyser. 
Of course, where the movements depicted are comparatively 
slow the pictures have their best opportunity to fuse with- 
out the provoking breaks and glinting of an ordinary 



series 



An astronomer it was who, as long ago as 1874, came 
within an ace of inventing the kinetoscope. In that year 
M. Janssen was able to determine the 
phases of Venus as she crossed the solar The Pilgrims of the Sky. 
disc by means of a succession of instan- 
taneous photographs. Had he placed these in a zoetrope 
the transit of the planet would have reappeared the mo- 
ment that the toy was rotated. Now that the kinetoscope 
and its sister, the kinetograph, have come to virtual per- 
fection, astronomers adopt both in bringing before popular 
audiences many splendid phenomena until lately known 
solely to the telescopic observer. Large assemblies in 
many great cities of the world are to-day aroused to en- 
thusiasm as the weird splendours of a solar eclipse are thus 
recalled before their eyes. We are promised next a simi- 
lar view of the sun in its full swing of rotation, spots and 
all ; this would not be more marvellous than M. Flamma- 
rion's pursuing the moon in its movements across the 
heavens from sunset to sunrise, and bidding it repeat the 
pilgrimage on canvas. 

In humbler walks than those of the sky, the photography 
of motion has been widely utilised. It catches the move- 
ments of the lips and tongue, and repeats them without 
variation or weariness for the instruction of deaf-mutes. 
It teaches the arts of swimming, driving, and piano-play- 

1 Detailed information, fully illustrated, is given in Living Picticres^ by 
Henry V. Hopgood. London, Optician and Photographic Trades Review 
Office, iSqq. 



3i8 QUICK PLATES 

ing; it tells how the Deccan peasant plies the shuttle for 
the fabric so like gossamer that it is known as the " woven 
wind," and how the Australian throws 
A New and Faithful ^he boomerang so that it returns to his 
Instructor. feet. It registers the uneasy sliding of 

the hull of a man-of-war as it leaves its 
launching-cradle for the sea. It promises to aid the art of 
medicine by portrayals of tetanus and epilepsy to be 
studied and compared at leisure. M. Doyen, a distin- 
guished French surgeon, has committed all the details of a 
capital operation to kinetographic films, with a teaching 
effect nearly as satisfactory as if the students stood beside 
the operating-table. 

In the field of mechanics the reproduction of movement 
opens quite as wide a door as that of an isolated view, 
especially now that the process of obtaining kinetographic 
films has been much simplified. The kinetoscope may 
easily magnify mechanical motions which are thoroughly 
mysterious to most of us, albeit that they take place in the 
commonest machines. Let the action of a type-writer, a 
sewing-machine, a printing-press, or a trolley motor be 
purposely retarded, and a series of its photographs would 
resolve many an every-day puzzle. 

The race is not always to the swift ; it is with plates 

of old-fashioned slowness that composite photographs are 

secured with their singular creations, 

Composite Photo- uukuowu bcforc the Camera gave them 
graphs. birth. An operator reduces his light so 

that a plate will require twenty seconds 
for a complete impression. Twenty faces, either directly 
or from good negatives, and all in the same position, are 
successively imprinted upon it, each for a single second ; 
the result is to *' bring into evidence all the traits in which 
there is agreement," and to leave *' but a ghost of a trace 
of individual peculiarities," as stated by Mr. Francis Gal- 




COMPOSITE PORTRAIT OF EIGHT MEMBERS OF 
NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 



THE 



TYPICAL FACES CREATED 319 

ton, the inventor of the process.^ Hence a striking addi- 
tion to the portrait gallery of mankind — in typical faces of 
school-girls, philosophers, physicians, Saxon soldiers, mo- 
tormen, Apaches, or men of science (Plate XV). 2 

A critic may ask. Are these composites really typical? 
Verification is easy. Select a class to be photographed — 
Indians, firemen, or any other you please. Choose at 
random twenty of their faces and make from them a com- 
posite. Then take haphazard another twenty faces from 
the same class and from them obtain a second composite. 
The first and second pictures will resemble each other so 
closely as to leave no doubt of the essential truth and sci- 
entific worth of the process. Clearly the day cannot be 
far ofT when physiognomy will have a basis in unimpeach- 
able fact — when the conventional caricatures, to-day sadly 
overworked as national types, will disappear for good and 
all. When we see the face of a stranger and classify it as 
that of a Frenchman or a Swede, we do so from residual 
remembrances which in their first estate may have been 
but few and not fairly representative, while subject to the 
distortion and wear that mar all the mintage of the mem- 
ory, however deep and clear its original stamp. Just as 
truth has been substituted for tradition in the case of animal 
movement, so we shall here replace vague impressions of 
foreigners and of special classes at home by exact and 
easily compared pictures. For truth very considerably 
beautified we must, however, be prepared. Dr. H. P. 
Bowditch, in the illustrations which accompany his arti- 
cle, "Are Composite Photographs Typical Pictures?" in 

1 Nature, May 23, 1878. The subject is further developed in his Inqtiiries 
into Htunan Faculty, published in 1883. 

2 Plate XV is from a composite photograph by Mr. Thomas W. Smillie, 
chief photographer to the United States National Museum, Washington : it 
represents eight members of the National Academy of Sciences — Spencer F. 
Baird, Henry L. Abbot, Charles A. Young, A. S. Packard, H. B. Hill, J. M. 
Crafts, George J. Brusli, and William Ferrcl. 



320 QUICK PLATES 

McChire's Magazine for September, 1894, has shown how 
much handsomer are the composites derived from Wend 
soldiers, a dinner club of Boston physicians, and from 
horse-car drivers, than the individual faces united to create 
them. This effect is explained by Mr. Galton, who points 
out that the features of a composite are always regular, 
since the irregularities, due to individual peculiarities, 
vanish from the final picture. 

Mr. Galton, in his original description of composite pho- 
tography, threw out a hint well worth recalling. He said 

that the camera might easily secure a 
"^^^ ^eslio°n. ^ portrait which would rival the work of 

the brush. It is the characteristic ex- 
pression of a face which commonly defies the photog- 
rapher, and which gives the thoughtfully painted canvas all 
its value. Now, if a photograph be taken at twenty differ- 
ent times, say a day apart, the setness of an ordinary pose 
will vanish, and in the various play of natural expression 
the man himself will stand forth, somewhat as if he' gave a 
good painter a score of sittings. In brief, the faculty of 
such a painter rests very largely in his brain as the ana- 
logue of the composite camera in giving Saliency to what 
in a face is really telling, in dropping out of view the self- 
conscious stare which a sitter may have at the first seance, 
and which is too evident in many single-impression photo- 
graphs. Much was done for portraiture when the time of 
photography was lowered to virtual instantaneity, so as to 
catch the features at their best, and before fatigue had 
lined them ; something more may be accomplished by 
those willing to take the trouble to add composite to 
simple portraiture. A great deal may be said about the 
lofty applications of the camera; just as much may be told 
regarding the exalted work of fire. But as common 
every-day cooking, to so great a critic as Lord Kelvin, far 
outranks every other task of flame, so the production of 
ordinary likenesses of the plain people continues to be the 



MAY PHOTOGRAPHY PREDICT? 321 

principal mission of the pencil of light. Inasmuch as Mr. 
Galton's suggestion may better the practice of photo- 
graphic portraiture, let it, therefore, be heard with respect 
and receive the careful tests it deserves. 

Sometimes a composite, due to combining the portraits 
of a father and mother, yields a picture bearing a striking 
resemblance to their children. In a lower branch of the 
tree of life, Mr. Galton proposes experiments with a view 
to being able to predict the effect of crossing particular 
strains of horses and cattle. 

When an impression, — a portrait, a landscape, or aught 
else, — has been secured on a photographic plate, it is often 
desirable to reproduce it in some inex- 
pensive form suited to the printing-press. Photographic Reproduc 
_ . . , , .... tion : Its Beginnings 

In its early days photographic printing . ^vith Nidpce, 
was restricted to the methods still in 
vogue for common portraiture. A negative, and every 
positive derived from it, had to take its deliberate way 
through a succession of fixing, toning, and cleansing baths. 
Was there a feasible mode by which light could yield a 
picture in relief for use in the common printing-press? 
Fortunately, yes. In this direction Niepce took a step sec- 
ond in importance only to his original exposure of a film to 
the action of light. With a view to reproduction he coated 
a copper plate with asphalt, and impressed it with a picture 
in his camera. The places not exposed to light remained 
soluble, and on being washed away left bare parts of the 
copper surface, which he then etched for use in a printing- 
press. Heliographs, as he styled the resulting pictures, 
were found among his papers after his death, and prove 
how completely he had grasped not only the production 
but the reproduction of a luminous image. ^ 

1 Daguerreotypes, despite the extreme delicacy of their relief, may easily 
and without the sliglitest injury be copied in a suitable plating bath. A feeble 
current — which occupies two days for its task — is best. 



322 PHOTOGRAPHIC REPRODUCTION 

His etching process is, as we shall presently note, at the 
foundation of many photo-printing methods now highly 
developed and widely popular, of which only a few can 
here be mentioned. There was an early divergence from 
Niepce's choice of asphalt in favour of a substance possess- 
ing the same susceptibility in a much higher degree. This 
was the .compound of gelatin and bichromate of potas- 
sium, discovered by Ponton in 1839. A film of this sub- 
stance may be much thicker than a film of asphalt, and, 
what is of greater importance, it can be much more quickly 
impressed with an image ; when the gelatin is dissolved 
away from the portions not acted on by light, the relief 
which remains can be employed as a mould from which to 
make a cast in metal for the ordinary printing-press. In a 
second method, now little used, the unhardened gelatin 
is not washed out with a solvent, but is carefully swollen 
with water; from the projections thus formed a metal re- 
lief is taken for the printer's use. A process at once 
simple and excellent in its results is to apply printers' ink 
directly to a gelatin plate when it leaves the camera; the 
ink is absorbed solely in those lines and dots of the gelatin 
which have been protected from light. For quick news- 
paper work there is recourse to zinc, and a reversion to the 
original plan of Niepce. A photograph is transferred to 
the metal in printers' ink, and this ink, as It resists the acid 
of an etching bath, leaves the uncorroded metal beneath it 
as a plate in relief for the press. 

For the incomparably more delicate work of photogra- 
vure, art is indebted to Fox-Talbot as the chief pioneer. 
He coated a metal plate with the compound of gelatin 
and bichromate of potassium, and, after he had impressed 
it with an image in the usual way, immersed the plate in 
an etching fluid. Where light exerted no effect the film 
allowed the liquid to pass readily ; where the light had 
acted to the full the gelatin was impervious. Between 



PRINTS UNFADING 323 

these extremes of light and darkness there were all degrees 
of resistance to the passage of the biting fluid. The prin- 
cipal mode of modern photogravure is Klic's modification of 
Fox-Talbot's process ; the film of chromated gelatin, hard- 
ened by the action of light, is transferred to a metal plate 
after exposure. The gelatin which remains unaffected 
by light, and therefore insoluble, can thus be readily 
washed away with warm water, leaving on the metal plate 
a resist of graduated thickness. By the utmost nicety of 
manipulation such a plate is capable of reproducing in ink 
almost all the beauty of an original masterpiece. 

Another remarkable branch of reproductive art is due 
to Poitevin, who, in 1855, was the first to incorporate a 
pigment with a film of sensitised gela- 
tin. He thus founded what has since The Carbon Process. 

been splendidly developed as the carbon 
process. In present practice a sheet of paper coated with 
a mixture of gelatin, sugar and colouring matter, is sensi- 
tised by being floated in a solution of potassium bichro- 
mate. At the points where light falls in the camera, the 
tissue is hardened ; at points of darkness it remains soluble. 
When the soluble portions are washed away a picture is 
left behind in an unchangeable pigment. The '* gum bi- 
chromate " process, which of late years has produced so 
many beautiful results, is a modification of the method in- 
troduced by Poitevin. 

Photographic printing branches out into many and In- 
creasing alliances with etching, engraving, and lithography. 
The simplest of them render only lines 
such as those of an architect's plan, or of Half-tone, 

a manuscript in facsimile. How can the 
half-tone, the graduated shadow so essential to a picture, 
be expressed? The usual method is to interpose between 
the gelatin and the original sketch or picture to be copied, 
a network of fine lines ruled near together on a glass plate, 



324 PHOTOGRAPHIC REPRODUCTION 



with the effect that, if inspection be not too close, a faithful 
transcript in dots seems conveyed to the plate. What this 

network or screen does is 
to break up the impressed 
picture into minute points 
which catch the ink from 
the roller of the printing- 
press; the interstices be- 
tween point and point being 
untouched by the ink, the 
picture is presented in what 
may be considered as stip- 
ples of refined character. 
In common work the rul- 
ings of the screen are about 
eighty to the inch ; in the il- 
lustration of the best books 
and magazines the rulings 
are twice as many, or even 
more. The portraits in this 
volume are executed inhalf- 
tone. When magnified, as 
in Fig. S6, we can under- 
stand how much the suggestions of the mind piece out and 
complete the crude outhnes of a '' process " picture. '' The 
eye sees what it brings with it the power of seeing." ^ 

1 The United States National Museum, at Washington, contains an admira- 
ble collection of photographs illustrating in detail every application of the 
camera, and the chief reproductive processes based on photography. 




Fig. 860 
Much enlarged from a half-tone portrait 
of Lord Kelvin. From iho. Journal of 
the Amateur Photographic Society of 
Madras. 



CHAPTER XXIII 

THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE SKIES 

DR. JOHN W. DRAPER, who, as we have already 
noted, was the first to portray the human face in the 
camera, was also the first to photograph a heavenly body. 
In March, 1840, he succeeded in taking 
pictures of the moon, which were fairly The Beginnings, 
good, considering the imperfection of 
his instruments. Five years later Professor G. P. Bond, at 
Harvard Observatory, obtained clear portraits of the moon 
with a 1 5 -inch refractor, and in so doing launched his ob- 
servatory on a career of astronomical photography which 
to-day gives it the lead in all the world. From 1865 to 
1875 Mr. Lewis M. Rutherfurd of New York took photo- 
graphs of the moon which for twenty years were unri- 
valled. At present the moon is the best photographed of 
all celestial objects, and yet Professor Barnard says that 
the best pictures thus obtained come short of what can be 
seen with a good telescope of very moderate size. Thus 
far minute details of the surface are beyond the reach of 
photography, but its accurate delineation of the less difficult 
features is of the highest value. 

" The photography of the surface features of the planets," 
adds this observer, *' is in an almost hopeless condition at 
present; yet much may be expected when an increased 

325 



326 PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE SKIES 

sensitiveness of plates has been secured." No plate as yet 
produced is fully responsive throughout the whole range of 
the telescopic eye„ Clearly enough, the draughtsman has 
not been ousted from every corner of the observatory as 
yet, although in most of its tasks his services have long 
ceased to be required ; in one of them the embarrassment 
of the camera is not a lack but an excess of light. Pro- 
fessor Janssen of the observatory at Meudon, near Paris, 
long ago succeeded in making the best photographs of 
portions of the sun's surface ; he has always used the wet- 
plate process, which, from its slowness, gives the best re- 
sults with the intense solar beam. 

Just at the turning-point between old and new methods 
of recording the phenomena of the sky, there was a con- 
trast between them which was decisive. 
Old and New Methods On July 29, 1878, a total solar ecHpse 
of Picturing Eclipses, ^^g g^ widely obscrvablc throughout 

the United States that forty to fifty 
drawings were made of the corona, duly published by the 
United States Naval Observatory, Washington, two years 
afterward. Says Professor Barnard : " On examination 
scarcely any two of them would be supposed to represent 
the same object, and none of them closely resembled the 
photographs taken at the same time. The method of reg- 
istering the corona by free-hand drawing under the condi- 
tions attending a total eclipse received its death-blow at 
that time, for it showed the utter inability of the average 
astronomer to sketch or draw under such circumstances 
what he really saw." Compare the pencil with the camera 
in one of its recent achievements. On January 22, 1898, 
Mrs. Maunder, with a lens only one and a half inches in 
diameter, secured impressions of swiftly moving coronal 
streamers about five million miles in length. It is evident 
enough that the pencil cannot compete with the camera in 
depicting the extremely brief phenomena of an eclipse, and 



THE UNSEEN BROUGHT TO VIEW 327 

it is also plain that an instrument of moderate size and cost 
is quite sufficient for good work. 

Often the images of the telescope are not fleeting, and 
remain visible quite long enough for a draughtsman to 
catch their outlines ; but other circumstances than those of 
time forbid the use of his pencil. Professor E. E. Barnard 
has taken observations at the Lick Observatory when the 
thermometer has stood at —32° C. At such a tempera- 
ture a camera may be used, while to employ a pencil is 
out of the question. 

In many tasks, where extremes of cold or heat do not 
trouble him, the astronomer is glad to avail himself of the 
quickness of the sensitive plate, which so 
far transcends the celerity of the eye. An untiring Eye. 
If in its rapidity of response a quick plate 
is superior to the retina, it has the further advantage of 
being exempt from fatigue. Light much too feeble to ex- 
cite vision can im.press an image on a sensitive plate if it 
be given time enough. During four hours ending at two 
o'clock in the morning, M. Zenger has taken photographs 
of Lake Geneva and Mont Blanc when nothing was per- 
ceptible to the eye. Turned to the heavens, this power to 
grasp the invisible brings to view a breadth of the universe 
unseen by the acutest observer using the most powerful 
telescope. Let the lenses of such an instrument be directed 
to a definite point in the sky by accurate machinery, and 
they will maintain their gaze with accumulating effect upon 
a sensitive plate through all the hours of a long night, and, 
if need be, will renew their task the next night, and the 
next. 

In this work the utmost mechanical precision is impera- 
tive. Professor E. E. Barnard says that if the motion of a 
guiding clock varies as much as roVo of an inch during an 
exposure of from three to eight hours, the images are 
spoiled and worthless. It was only after repeated failure 



328 PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE SKIES 

that mechanicians were able to make a clock sufficiently 
accurate to keep a star image at one fixed point on a plate. 
Steadily caught at one unchanging place, a ray, however 
feeble, goes on impressing the pellicle of a plate, minute 
after minute, hour after hour, night after night, until at last, 
by sheer persistence, the light from a star or a nebula too 
faint to be detected in a telescope imprints its image. 
Some images have been obtained as the result of twenty- 
five hours' exposure during ten successive nights, so as to 
get impressions from as near the zenith as possible, where 
atmospheric disturbances work least harm because atmo- 
spheric paths are there at their shortest. Myriads of 
heavenly bodies have thus been added to the astronomer's 
ken, which, without the dry plate, would probably have 
remained unfound forever. ^ 

When Dr. Maddox was busy stirring together his 
bromides and gelatin he did not know that from his 
bowl the universe was to receive a new diameter; 
but so it has proved. The invention of the telescope 
marks one great epoch in the astronomer's advance ; an- 
other era, as memorable, dawned for him when he added 
to the telescope a camera armed with a gelatin film. He 
gained at once the power of penetrating depths of space 
which otherwise would never have sped the explorer a 
revealing ray. As the camera outranges the eye, in 
that very act it surpasses every task of depiction which the 
eye may dictate to the hand. 

So efficient is the scouring of the heavens by the tele- 
scopic camera that to its plates is now resigned the search 
for those little worlds, or world-fragments, known as aster- 
oids. The hunt is simplicity itself. A plate is exposed in 
a camera, and directed by clockwork to a particular point 
in the sky for two or three hours. Because the stars are 

1 See a superbly illustrated article by Professor E. E. Barnard, Photographic 
Times, August, 1895. 



THE NEAREST ASTEROID 329 

virtually motionless in a time so short, they register them- 
selves as tiny round dots. The asteroids, on the other 
hand, have an appreciable motion across 

the field of view, somewhat as the moon Asteroids Discover 

has, and so they betray themselves as Themselves, 

minute but measurable streaks. On 
August 13, 1898, a streak of this kind disclosed to Herr 
Witt at the Observatory of Urania, at Berlin, that most 
interesting and important of all asteroids, Eros, about ten 
miles in diameter, which approaches the earth more closely 
than any heavenly body but the moon. It is expected 
that observations of Eros will enable astronomers to re- 
vise with new precision their computations of the distance 
of the sun and the planets. A faint streak similar to 
that observed by Herr Witt once told Professor Barnard 
that a comet had passed in front of his telescope — a comet 
so small and flimsy that only a photographic plate could 
see it. Early in 1899 Professor William Pickering thus 



i/^WYvo/^ ©(viaXculu^ ditLu^. ^junw. OvrUA). G^ xto/vv). {^nJatMxjn- ^alatu4..UyVu)eiK;. 

Fig. 87. 

Satellites of Saturn. Phoebe, the ninth, discovered by Professor 

William Pickering. 

discovered a new satellite of Saturn, making its known ret- 
inue nine in number. This new moon made its appearance 
on four plates exposed with the Bruce telescope at Are- 
quipa, in Peru. Its light is so faint that no telescope in 
existence is powerful enough directly to disclose the tiny 
orb (Fig. 87). 

Where direct vision is easy, the camera enables the pho- 
tographer to save time in an astonishing way. Professor 
Common's photograph of the moon, taken in forty minutes, 
rewarded him with as full detail as had four years* work 



330 PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE SKIES 

with the telescope and pencil. Often an image seen only in 
part in the telescope is completed with wonderful beauty 
in the camera. The streaming tail of a 
Forty Minutes instead comet is frequently doubled or trebled 
of Four Years. jj^ length as it imprints itself upon the 
gelatin plate. Brooks's comet of 1893, 
in one of its photographs taken with the Willard lens at 
Lick Observatory, showed its tail as if beating against 
a resisting medium, and sharply bent at right angles near 
the end, as if at that point it encountered a stronger cur- 
rent of resistance. Many nebulae, those of the Pleiades 
especially, appear in much greater extent and detail in a 
photograph than to an observer at the eye-piece of a tele- 
scope. Their rays are particularly rich in the vibrations 
which affect the sensitive plate, but to which the eye is 
irresponsive.^ 

More than once a word has been said about the unsus- 
pected worth of the incidental; celestial photography sup- 
plies a capital illustration. In 1882, at 
Accident and Essence, the Cape of Good Hopc, whcn the great 
comet of that year appeared, it occurred 
to Dr. Gill, the director of the observatory, that it might 
be possible to photograph it. To the telescope, pointed 
at the comet, a small camera was accordingly attached. 
After a short exposure the plate was developed and the 
image of the comet came into view. So far as is known, 
this was the first comet ever photographed. The plate, 
moreover, showed not only the comet which had been 
sought, but also stars which were unsought, and that were 
quite invisible in the telescope (Plate XVI). From their 
images, thus unwittingly secured, came the project of a 
new map of the heavens, which should reveal its orbs to 

1 Address of Professor E. E. Barnard as vice-president of Section A, — 
mathematics and astronomy, — American Association for the Advancement of 
Science, i8q8. 




Plate XVI. 



PHOTOGRAPH OF COMET BY UR. DAVID GILL, 1882. 
With incidtntal portraiture of stars invisible in the telescope. 



FLAME COLOURS MEAN MUCH 331 

the limit of a plate's impressibility. With the Observatory 
of Paris as their centre, astronomers throughout the world 
are now engaged upon a chart of the sky which will con- 
tain at least twenty million stars. In future generations a 
comparison of the pictures now in hand with pictures of 
later production will have profound interest. Stellar 
changes of place and nebular alterations of form will indi- 
cate the laws of the birth, the life, the death of worlds. 

At the close of the year 1899 there were stored at Har- 
vard Observatory 56,000 plates depicting the heavens 
during every available night beginning with 1886. 
Doublet lenses, of much wider field than the single lenses 
usually employed, have been chosen by Professor E. C. 
Pickering, the director, for this work. Thanks to their use, 
certain of the plates have been found to bear images of 
Eros, impressed at intervals for years before the discovery 
of the asteroid at Berlin. These impressions, indicate a 
considerable portion of the orbit of the object. Records 
of equal value doubtless remain to be detected in this re- 
markable portrait-gallery of the skies. 

In the moments which follow striking a match in the 
dark, we see in succession the hues proper to burning 
phosphorus, to sulphur, and to the car- 
bon of the match-stick. In a display of what Colours Teii. 
fireworks the combustibles are chosen 
for a display of colour much more variegated and brilliant. 
We recognise at once the yellow flame of sodium, the crim- 
son blaze of strontium, the purple glitter of zinc aflame. 
These and all other elements when they reach glowing heat 
give out light of characteristic hues ; to examine them 
minutely a spectroscope is employed. In its essence this 
instrument is a glass prism which sorts out with consum- 
mate nicety the distinctions of colour and line borne in the 
light of the sun, or a star, or a meteor, or of the fuel ablaze 
in a laboratory furnace. Every ray as it passes through a 



332 PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE SKIES 

prism is deflected in a degree peculiar to its colour: violet 
light, at one end of the rainbow scale, is deflected most ; 
red light, at the other end, is deflected least. It is because 
solar and stellar beams display the characteristic spectra of 
sodium, iron, hydrogen, and many other terrestrial ele- 
ments, highly individualised as each of them is, that we 
know that the sun and the stars are built of much the same 
stuff as the earth. 

In passing from the colours of the solar spectrum to its 
many minute interruptions, ** the new astronomy " began. 
As photographed by Professor Rowland upon sheet after 
sheet for a total length of forty feet, the spectrum of the 
sun is crossed by thousands of dark lines. The interpreta- 
tion of the most conspicuous of these lines by Bunsen and 
Kirchhoff, in 1859, marks an epoch in the study of "the 
heavens. Let us approach their explanation by a simple 
experiment. If we sing a certain note upon the wires of 
an open piano, just that string will respond which, if it were 
struck, would utter that note. Precisely so when we pass 
from vibrations of sound to those of light; a vapour when 
cool absorbs by sympathy those waves of light which, if it 
were highly heated, it would send forth. Hence the dark 
lines in the solar spectrum tell us what particular gases, at 
comparatively low temperatures, are stretched as an absorb- 
ing curtain between the inner blazing core and outer space. 
To choose a convincing example : when the spectrum of 
the sun and that of iron are compared side by side in the 
same instrument, bright lines of the iron coincide with dark 
lines of the solar spectrum (Plate XVII). 

The tints and lines of a spectrum, whether from the 
sun or a star, disclose not only the character but the con- 
sistence of the elements which send them to the eye or to 
the photographic plate. Hydrogen, for example, when it 
burns at ordinary pressures, as it may in the simplest 
laboratory experiment, emits a spectrum of bright lines 



DISCLOSURES OF THE SPECTRUM 333 

crossed by sharp thin Hnes of darkness. These bright 
hnes, when the gas has high pressure, broaden out and be- 
come ahnost continuous, so as to resemble those emitted 
by a glowing solid. Hence an astronomer is told by one 
particular spectrum that it comes from a star having a 
highly condensed gaseous core, while another spectrum 
betokens a true nebula — a vast body of gas aglow in ex- 
treme attenuation. A spectroscope, therefore, reveals not 
only what a heavenly body is made of, but also the physi- 
cal condition in which its substance exists, whether as a 
solid, a liquid, or a gas. 

The lines in a stellar spectrum are liable not only to be 
broadened out, but to be shifted from their normal place, 
and this shifting has profound signifi- 
cance, according to a principle first an- Lines Out of Place 
nounced by Christian Doppler in 1841. ^^"^^°"^ ^"'=^- 
If a star is at rest, relatively to the earth, 
the tints and lines of the elements aglow on its surface will 
have positions in its spectrum as changeless as those due 
to the iron, or the sulphur, aflame on the chemist's tray. 
But if the star is moving toward the earth, or away from 
it, the spectral lines will appear a little to the right or left 
of their normal position, and in so doing disclose the rate of 
approach or recession. To understand this we have only 
to enter the field of acoustics. Suppose that a listener 
takes up his post midway between two railroad stations 
somewhat distant from each other. As a locomotive ap- 
proaches him let us imagine that its whistle is blown con- 
tinuously. To the engineer on the foot-board the whistle 
has a certain note ; to the listener who is standing still the 
whistle has a somewhat shriller note, because the motion 
of the engine toward him has the effect of shortening the 
sound-waves, and shrillness increases with the shortness of 
such waves — with the greater number per second which 
he hears. If all the engines of the line have whistles ex- 



334 PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE SKIES 

actly alike, a listener with his eyes shut can easily tell 
whether it is a freight-train that is advancing, or an ordi- 
nary express, or a '' limited " running at fifty miles an 
hour; the quicker the train, the shriller the sound of its 
approaching whistle (Fig. 88). Sir William Huggins, 
the pioneer in applying this principle to reading stellar 
motions, adopts a parallel illustration : ** To a swimmer 



Fig. 88. 

A, waves between two points at rest relatively to each other. 

B, waves between two points at a shortening distance apart. 

C, waves between two points at a lengthening distance apart. 

striking out from the shore each wave is shorter, and the 
number he goes through in a given time is greater than 
would be the case if he stood still in the water." 

Let us now return to the sister phenomena of light. At 
one end of the visible spectrum the violet rays have about 
half the length of the red rays at the other end of the scale ; 
accordingly about twice as many violet as red rays enter 
the eye in a second. Let us imagine a star like Betelgeux, 
which, at rest, would emit red rays solely. If such a star 
were to rush toward the earth with the speed of light, 
186,400 miles a second, its rays would be so much short- 
ened as to be halved in length, and the star would appear 
violet — its characteristic hues and lines showing themselves 
at one extreme of the visible scale instead of at the other. 
Of course, no star moves toward the earth with more than 
a small fraction of the speed of light, and yet so refined is 
the measuring of the displacement of spectral lines that a 



STAR MOTIONS DETECTED 335 

motion toward the earth of somewhat less than one mile in 
a second can be readily determined. In the case of Betel- 
geux its movement toward the earth is known to be 17.6 
miles a second, about ttoo^o part of the velocity of light, 
the displacement of its red lines toward the violet end of 
the scale being about ttooo part of the whole length of the 
spectrum. If, in a contrary case, a star is receding from 
the earth, its spectroscopic lines will be shifted toward the 
red end of the scale, just -as a locomotive whistle falls to a 
lower pitch as the engine moves away from a listener 
standing still. By this method Gamma Leonis is known 
to be travelling away from us at the rate of 2*5.1 miles a 
second. In this unique power of detecting motion in the 
line of sight, the spectroscope when furnished with a sensi- 
tive film enormously enhances the revealing power of the 
telescope. 

The sun was, of course, the first heavenly body to have 
its spectrum caught on a sensitive plate. In 1863 Dr. 
(now Sir) William Huggins attempted to 
photograph the spectrum of a star. He soiar and steiiar 
obtained a stain on his plates, due to spectra, 

the spectra of Sirius and Capella, in 
which, however, no spectral lines were discernible. In 
1872 Dr. Henry Draper of New York obtained a photograph 
of the spectrum of Vega, in which four lines were shown ; 
this was the first successful picture in the series which 
Dr. Draper gave to the world during the following ten 
years. Since his death, in 1882, Mrs. Draper has es- 
tablished the Draper Meniorial at Harvard Observa- 
tory, for the continuance of his labours on an extended 
scale. The photographs by this Memorial owe much to 
the Vogel method, by which the plates are sensitised for 
green, red, and yellow rays. Were this sensibility to colour 
still further increased, the photographs of stellar spectra 
would tell a yet fuller story than they do to-day. Owing 



336 PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE SKIES 

to irregular atmospheric currents, the image of a star dan- 
cing around the narrow sHt of a spectroscope may elude 
even a practised observer. Photography, with its summa- 
tion of recurrent impressions, gives a perfectly uniform 
image of the composite type which Mr. Galton introduced 
in human portraiture. That image, for all its minuteness, 
may bear a most informing superscription : 

In the northwestern sky one may observe the constella- 
tion of the Charioteer — to most advantage in April or May. 

At Harvard Observatory, in 1889, it 
Twin stars. was remarked that a spectrum from a 

star in that constellation. Beta Aurigae, 
varied from night to night in a singular manner. The 
cause was found to be that the light comes, not from a 
single star, but from a pair of stars, periodically eclipsing 
each other, and having a period of revolution of slightly 
less than four days. In determining the rate of motion of 
these stars as 150 miles a second, their distance from each 
other as 8,000,000 miles, and their combined mass as two 
and three-tenth times that of the sun, Professor Pickering 
regards the prism as multiplying the magnifying power of 
the telescope about five thousand times. To a telescope 
such a double star appears as but a single point of light; in 
a spectroscope each component star reveals its own spec- 
trum. When the star is approaching the earth its spectral 
lines are shifted to the violet end of the scale ; when the 
star is receding from the earth, its lines are displaced to 
the red end of the scale. In the case of Beta Aurigae the 
change in the spectrum is so rapid that it is sometimes 
perceptible in quickly successive photographs, and becomes 
very marked in the course of an evening : 

Plate XVII illustrates this phenomenon. In Fig. t the theo- 
retical curve during December, 1889, is represented by the sinuous 
line, abscissas indicating times, and ordinates the corresponding 
separations of the components of the K line. The black circles 





1 




1 


m 


■ 


1 


1 


r 








jjii 








1 


1 


IHI 


■ 


111 




■ 


1 




SOLAR SPECTRUM COMPARED WITH TPLAT OF IRON. 
(Seep. 332.) 



t ' ' ' 

fe- ... 


: % , 


tT 


i 4 


i 

f 


11 


ir 


1 



Plate XVI T. 

SPECTRA OF BETA AURIGA. 
(See p. 337.) 



THE TELESCOPE OUTDONE 337 

represent the twenty-seven photographs taken during this month, 
their ordinates representing the result of a rough measure of the 
separation of the hues. In no case does the observed position dif- 
fer from that given by theory by more than the accidental errors of 
measurement. Fig. 2 is a contact print from the original negative 
taken December 31, 1889, at 11 h. 5 m.^ Greenwich mean time. 
Fig. 3 is an enlargement with cylindrical lens of this same nega- 
tive. Fig. 4 represents a still greater enlargement of the same 
negative, and shows the K line distinctly double ; by shading one 
part of the photograph the strong line a to the left of K is also 
shown in the enlargement to be double. . , . Fig. 5 is a similar 
enlargement of a negative taken December 30, 1889, at 17 >^. 6 m.^ 
Greenwich mean time, eighteen hours previous to Fig. 4. The lines 
here are single.^ 

This subtile means of detection is set upon the track not 
only of double stars, but on that of such a star as Algol, 
which is attended by a planet so large as to eclipse it 
almost wholly in a period somewhat shorter than three 
days. 

These binary systems, so different from any previously known, 
would in all likehhood have been hidden for ages to come but for 
photography, because until that discovery was made there was no 
apparent reason for every-day examination of the spectrum of 
a star. Indeed, until then, when the lines were once carefully 
measured, they were put aside by the observer as finished and 
definite records of the star's spectrum. These first results indicate 
that the components of Beta Aurigae are separated by an angular 
interval of only 9-o-oVo"o P^^^ ^'^ ^ degree, a quantity so small that 
twenty years ago no one would ever dream of being able to 
measure it. 2 

New demands give the eye new refinements : the dupli- 
city of the spectral lines of Beta Aurigae was discovered 
by Miss A. C. Maury. Mrs. W. P. Fleming of Harvard 
Observatory has become so expert in detecting variable 
stars by their spectra that she recognises them instantly 

1 Henry Draper Memorial, Fourth Annual Report, Cambridge, Massachu- 
setts, 1890. 

2 Address by Professor H. C. Russell, government astronomer, Sydney, 
to Section A, — astronomy, mathematics, and physics, — Australian Association 
for the Advancement of Science, 1893. 



338 PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE SKIES 

among hundreds of other spectra on the same plate. And 
mark the value of these photographic spectra for subse- 
quent investigation. Mrs. Fleming says : " While an as- 
tronomer with a telescope, be it ever so powerful, is at the 
mercy of the weather, the discussion of photographs goes 
on uninterruptedly, and is much more trustworthy than 
visual work, since, where a question of error arises, any one 
interested in the research can revise the original observa- 
tion by another and independent examination of the pho- 
tograph."^ During the eight years beginning with 1892, 
four stars of more than the ninth magnitude were added 
to the charts of astronomy; in every case the discoverer 
was Mrs. Fleming as she detected the spectrum of a new 
star in celestial photographs. 

Professor J. Clerk-Maxwell was of opinion that the rings 
of Saturn are simply aggregates of meteorites which pre- 
serve their outline by swift rotation. 
The Rings of Saturn ^^'^^ belief has been verified by Professor 
are Meteoric. Jamcs E. Keclcr at the Allegheny Ob- 

servatory, his spectroscope proving that 
the inner edge of each ring moves more swiftly than the 
outer edge. If the ring were a solid body the reverse 
would be the fact, and the lines in its spectrum would be 
very nearly continuations of the "lines in the spectrum of 
the central ball. So refined is this field of inquiry that the 
astronomer's reliance is upon a micrometer exquisite enough 
to measure a space of to"ooo^ of an inch on a photograph. 2 

The latest chapter in the story of the solar spectrum has 
been added by Professor George E. Hale, director of 
the Yerkes Observatory. An ordinary spectroscope has a 
slit through which a narrow ray of light passes into a prism 
for dispersion. To this slit Professor Hale adds another 

1 Astronomy and Astrophysics, October, 1893, p. 687. 

2 " Some Notes on the Application of Photography to the Study of Celestial 
Spectra," by James E. Keeler, Photographic Ti?nes, May, 1898. 



NEW SOLAR REVELATIONS 339 

which permits only light of a single colour to reach his 
photographic plate. Because this light is of but one hue, 
pictures can be obtained of objects not 
to be photographed in any other way. The Spectro-heiiograph. 
Moving the apparatus at will, he secures 
photographs of the prominences round the edge of the sun, 
as well as of the whole surface of its disc. A visual ex- 
amination of the prominences would require two hours, but 
pictures of them may be taken in two minutes. Many 
faculae, undiscernible by any other means, have been 
brought to view by Professor Hale's instrument, which he 
calls the spectro-heiiograph. The device was suggested 
by Janssen as long ago as 1869; it was independently in- 
vented by Professor Hale in 1889. 

The extension of disclosures by the camera in regions 
blank to the eye seems without bound. Beyond the violet 
ray of the solar spectrum extend vibra- 
tions which, though invisible, have been singular Discoveries. 

caught on photographic plates ever since 
the experiments of Scheele in 1777. Victorium, an ele- 
ment recently discovered by Sir William Crookes, has a 
spectrum high up in the ultra-violet region, which, there- 
fore, can be studied only photographically. More than one 
element has made its first appearance to the chemist as 
he has observed the spectrum of the sun. Helium thus 
introduced itself long before its discovery in the atmo- 
sphere of the earth. Coronium, which appears in the solar 
corona, has been diligently searched for, especially in the 
tufa of volcanoes, but thus far without assured results. 

Toward the end of the spectrum, beyond the red, are 
invisible radiations which evaded capture until 1887, when 
Captain Abney secured an image from them on a bromide- 
of-silver plate. He maintains that in the use of plates 
sensitive to such ultra-visible rays, astronomers have a new 
means of exploring the heavens, and are free to enter upon 



340 PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE SKIES 

a fresh chain of discoveries. To the stars already known it 
is in their power to add two classes as yet unseen — stars 
newly born or newly dead, whose temperatures in conse- 
quence are below the range of visible incandescence. 

When light succeeded the pencil as a limner of nebulae 
there was the keen interest that attaches to the calling of 
a new witness in a case before the high- 
Nebuiar Evolution, est court — a witncss SO much more ob- 
servant and alert than any other, so 
absolutely devoid of bias or prejudice, that his evidence 
decides the verdict. For a century and more the nebular 
hypothesis of the universe, propounded by Kant and La- 
place, had been vigorously debated by astronomers and 
physicists. The great telescopes of the two Herschels had 
enabled observers to descry nebulae having the shapes 
which vast cloudy masses would assume in the successive 
phases of condensation imagined in the theory. Some 
were spherical in form, others were disc-like,, yet others 
were ring-shaped, and the most significant outline of all, 
that of a spiral, was also discerned. But when Lord 
Rosse's great reflector was turned upon certain of these 
masses they were resolved into stars, and a good many 
critics said that, given telescopes sufficiently powerful, all 
nebulas would in the same manner prove to be nothing else 
than stars. A few years afterward the spectroscope was 
employed by the astronomer, and soon it discriminated 
between seeming nebulae, which are really star clusters, 
and true nebulae, which are only the raw material from 
which stars are condensed. In the evening of August 29, 
1864, the spectroscope, attached to a telescope, was for 
the first time directed to a nebula — the planetary nebula in 
Draco, by Dr. (now Sir) William Huggins. This is what 
he saw : 

The riddle of the nebulae was solved. The answer, which had 
come to us in the light itself, read, Not an aggregation of stars, 




Plate XVIII. 



THE NEBULA IN ORION. 

From the drawing by Professor G. P. Bond, 1859-63. 




Plate XIX. 



THE NEBULA IN ORION. 

Phctographed at Lick Observatory, November ]6, if 



EVOLUTION OF THE HEAVENS 341 

but a luminous gas. Stars after the order of our own sun, and of 
the brighter stars, would give a difiPerent spectrum ; the light of 
this nebula had clearly been emitted by a luminous gas. With an 
excess of caution, at the moment I did not venture to go further 
than to point out that we had here to do with bodies of an order 
quite different from that of the stars. Further observations soon 
convinced me that, though the short span of human life is far too 
minute relatively to cosmical events for us to expect to see in suc- 
cession any distinct steps in so august a process, the probabihty is 
indeed overwhelming in favour of an evolution in the past, and 
still going on, of the heavenly hosts. A time surely existed when 
the matter now condensed into the sun and planets filled the whole 
space occupied by the solar system, in the condition of gas, which 
then appeared as a glowing nebula, after the order, it may be, of 
some now existing in the heavens. There remained no room for 
doubt that the nebulae, which our telescopes reveal to us, are the 
early stages of long processions of cosmical events, which corre- 
spond broadly to those required by the nebular hypothesis in one 
or other of its forms. ^ 

The first photograph of a nebula, that of Orion, was 
taken by Dr. Henry Draper on September 30, 1880. In 
the following March he took another in a little more than 
two hours, which, for nearly every purpose of study, was 
incomparably better than the drawing that had occupied 
Professor Bond for every available hour during four years 
ending with 1863. Better still is the photograph secured 
in but forty minutes with the Crossley Reflector at Lick 
Observatory, November 16, 1898 (Plates XVIII and 
XIX). Dr. Isaac Roberts of Crowborough, in England, is 
a successful photographer of nebulae, and his pictures are 
instructive in the extreme because he compares them with 
pictures of stellar systems ; between the two he finds a 
connection strongly suggestive of derivation. 

To begin with, he shows a number of photographs of star re- 
gions in which the stars can be seen grouped into semi-circles, 
segments, portions of ellipses, and lines of various degrees of curv- 
ature. Some of these groups are composed of stars of nearly 
equal magnitude ; some of faint stars, also of nearly equal 

1 NineteentJi, Century, June, 1897. 



342 PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE SKIES 

magnitude ; while the distances between the stars are remark- 
ably regular. Passing from these characteristics of stellar ar- 
rangement to photographs of spiral nebulse, Dr. Roberts points 
out that the nebulous matter in the spirals is broken up into star- 
like loci, which in the regularity of their distribution resemble 
the curves and combinations of stars exhibited by photographs 
upon which no trace of nebulosity is visible. It seems, therefore, 
that the curvilinear grouping of stars of nearly equal magnitude 
gives evidence that the stars have been evolved from attenuated 
matter in space by the action of vortical motions and by gravita- 
tion. Exactly how the vortical motions were caused, or what has 
brought about the distributions of nebulosity in the spiral nebulae, 
cannot be answered ; but the marvellous pictures of Dr. Roberts 
establish the reality of the grouping, and furnish students of celes- 
tial mechanics with rich food for contemplation .1 

As Professor Bond drew the nebula of Andromeda with his 
eye at the best telescope he could command, he depicted dark 
lanes which come out in a photograph as divisions between zones 
of nebulous matter. What appeared to be accidental and enig- 
matical vacuities are shown to be the consequences of cosmogoni- 
cal action. The hypothesis of the formation of worlds from 
nebulse is thus confirmed, if not demonstrated, by the discovery of 
this new link to connect celestial species. The spiral nebula in 
Canes Venatici exhibits in a most unmistakable manner a " fluid 
haze of light," eddying into worlds, and enables us to see cosmic 
processes at work.'^ 

This nebula may be instructively compared with the 
ring nebula in Lyra (Plate XX). 

Beyond and above any single photograph of a nebula, 
the camera proves that nebulae are much vaster than they 
appear in the most powerful telescope, and this fact 
strongly supports the hypothesis of Kant and Laplace as 
to the origin of the universe. In two particulars, however, 
that hypothesis has been modified by the advance of physi- 
cal and mathematical research. It was originally framed 

1 Nature, March 3, 1898. 

A second volume of Dr. Roberts's Photographs of Stars, Star Clusters, and 
Nebul(2 was published in December, 1899, by Witherby & Co., 326 High 
Holborn, London. It contains seventy-two photographs printed in collotype 
from the original negatives, with descriptive and explanatory letterpress. 

2 Nature, March 10, 1898. 




GREAT SPIRAL NEBULA IN CANES VENATICI. 

(Enlarged 3 diameters.) 

Taken in 3 hours with 8-inch refractor. Goodsell Observatory, Northfield, Minnesota. 




Plate XX. 

RING NEBULA IN LYRA. 

(Enlarged 5 diameters.) 

Taken in 2 hours with 8-inch refractor. Goodsell Observatory, Northfield, INTinnesota. 



NATURE'S HISTORY LEGIBLE 343 

long before the relations of heat to its sister forces were 
understood. It is not now deemed necessary to suppose 
that the primal temperature of the universe was high; the 
collision of its particles, as attracted together by gravita- 
tion, is a quite sufficient explanation of the heat which a 
star may exhibit when first condensed. Nor is it necessary 
to suppose that the original condition of cosmical matter 
was that of a gas ; it m^y have been that of fine dust, or 
even an aggregation of meteorites, such as those which 
still rotate around the central ball of Saturn. Professor 
George H. Darwin says that a meteoric swarm, seen from 
the distance of the stars, would behave like a mass com- 
posed of continuous gas. 

The triumphs of light in the astronomical camera but 
re-affirm the solidarity of nature, testifying once more 
that any new thread caught from her skein leads the ex- 
plorer not only through labyrinths which puzzled him of 
old, but to new heavens otherwise hidden for all time. 
Nothing within human knowledge is more marvellous than 
the agency, apparently so simple, concerned in all this. A 
ray of light, infinitesimal in energy, persists on its way, for 
years it may be, through the whole radius of the universe, 
untired, untolled ; its undulations, intricate beyond full por- 
trayal, arrive with an unconfused story of the physical 
consistence and chemical nature of their source, of the 
atmosphere that waylaid them, of the direction in which, 
and at the rate at which, their parent orb was spinning or 
flying when the ray set out for the earth. 

To men of old who knew only what had befallen them- 
selves and their dwelling-place during a few generations, 
it was but natural to repeat: ''The thing that hath been, 
it is that which shall be : and that which is done is that 
which shall be done : and there is no new thing under the 
sun."-^ But we of to-day are in a different case. The 

1 Ecclesiastes i, 9. 



344 PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE SKIES 

astronomer joining camera to telescope brings to proof in 
unexpected fashion that the first act in the cosmical drama, 
like the last, conforms to the law of derivation, that the 
universe exhibits in its totahty the same rule of descent 
with modification which the naturaHst observes in the moth, 
or the botanist in the field of wheat. The latest nebular 
photographs display a continuous series of gradations from 
the most attenuated wisps of matter to stellar spheres which 
bear evidence of having been newly ushered into life. '* In 
a forest," said a great astronomer. Sir William Herschel, 
** we see around us trees in every stage of their hfe-history. 
There are the seedlings just bursting from the acorn, the 
sturdy oaks in their full vigour, those also that are old and 
near decay, and the prostrate trunks of the dead." Much 
the same succession in the stages of cosmic life are dis- 
closed by the camera, and Evolution stands forth con- 
firmed as true not only of every branch of the tree of life, 
but of nature as the sum of all things. 

Nearly three hundred years ago George Herbert could 

say: 

Nothing hath got so far 
But man hath caught and kept it as his prey. 

His eyes dismount the highest star, 

He is in little all the sphere. 
Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they 

Find their acquaintance there. 

At the close of the nineteenth century his insight receives 
confirmation on every hand. We learn with wonder that 
the scope of life on land and sea, the architecture of the 
forest, the ocean and the plain, with all their myriad ten- 
antry, are what they are because the atoms which built 
them were present, and in such and such proportions, in the 
birth-cloud of the world. If a rose has tints of incompara- 
ble beauty, they are conferred by elements thence derived, 
whose kin, aflame in an orb a celestial diameter away, send 
forth the beam needful to reveal that beauty. Were the 



INQUIRY NEVER FRUITLESS 345 

sun less rich in variety of fuel than it is, the earth, despite 
its own diversity of substance, would be vastly less a feast 
for the eye than that newly spread before us at every dawn. 
When we remember how disinterested was the quest 
which has led to so great and unexpected knowledge, we 
begin to see that the philosopher is often, and unwittingly, 
the chiefest prospector and the best. It is doubtful 
whether any path of discovery whatever, no matter how 
unrelated to utility it may seem, can be pursued without 
leading to gain at last. No study would at the first glance 
appear to be more remote from influence upon human 
thought and feeling than the portrayal of heavenly bodies 
too distant for telescopic view. Yet that portrayal has 
served to enlarge our conceptions of the varied forms which 
worlds and suns may display ; the shimmer of the nebulae 
enters the camera to corroborate the story of the rock, the 
plant, and the animal, as each tells us how it came to be. 
Adding to vision the eye of artifice, we are confirmed in the 
faith that nature is intelligible to her inmost heart, as naught 
else than the expression of reason, which, infinite itself, has 
implanted in the mind of man an undying desire to under- 
stand of the infinite all it may. 



CHAPTER XXIV 

PHOTOGRAPHY AND ELECTRICITY AS ALLIES 

ELECTRICITY, as we have seen, has been a most pro- 
Hfic parent in the field of art ; scarcely less fertile 
have been the applications of the camera. Each of them in 

reaching out for alliances has entered 
The Bolometer. the province of the other, with the result 

that the world's progress in both science 
and art has received a powerful impetus from instruments 
at once electrical and photographic. Let us first of all 
note their exploration of those breadths of the spectrum 
so long unsuspected by the investigator, and now steadily 
extending to many times the area directly visible to the 
eye. A layman would suppose that the endeavours of 
physicists to lengthen out the visible spectrum would 
cease with the very considerable additions due to the direct 
photography of rays ultra-violet and ultra-red. But the 
lay mind knows little of the persistence and address of the 
accomplished physicist, and can only marvel at the mode 
in which he summons fresh resources from points of the 
compass at first seeming the farthest removed from his 
task. 

In Chapter VIII it was said that extremely minute vari- 
ations of temperature are detected by a galvanometer 
attached to a thermopile. Professor S. P. Langley, sec- 
retary of the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, has 

346 



THE WONDERFUL BOLOMETER 347 

refined this instrument into an appliance which he styles 
the bolometer. Its delicate wire, much thinner than a 
human hair, through which an electric current constantly 
passes, and sensitive to much less than the ten-millionth of 
a degree Centigrade, is moved by minute steps through 
the invisible areas of the solar spectrum ; each indication 
of temperature, automatically photographed, comes out as 
a line which varies in depth of tone with the intensity of 
the thermal ray. When the device has finished its journey 
the larger part of the whole breadth of solar radiation rises 
to view — in all fifteen times as extensive as the spectrum 
which Newton saw. Plate XXI represents the infra-red 
spectrum of a rock-salt prism, in its wave-lengths 0.75 [X 
to 2.29 (X.i 

The bolometer, employed with each chemical element, 
promises that one day the physicist shall have before him 
a full, or at least a tolerably complete, map of every dis- 
tinctive spectrum. He can then ask. Given such and such 
vibrations, how is the body constituted that sent them 
forth? — much as a musician might try to reason from the 
tone and timbre of a note to the structure of the instru- 
ment that uttered the note. A vibrating square of metal 
has a different sound from a vibrating triangle, and so on 
with every other resonant mass of simple outline. Having 
ascertained the distinctive note of each, it would be easy 
from a given sound to say that a square, a triangle, a 
circle, or other simple form is in vibration. In effect, there- 
fore, as an atom is busy spreading its spectrum before the 
investigator it is doing nothing else than painting its own 
portrait, with no small promise to the chemist, who takes 
compounds apart that he may learn their inner architecture, 
their intricate ties. 

1 Professor Langley describes the work of the bolometer in detail in his 
paper on " The Astrophysical Observatory,^' included in The Stnithsonlan In- 
st'itution^ iS4b-gb—the History oj its First Half -century, Washington, 1897. 



348 THE CAMERA AND ELECTRICITY 

Fresh proofs await us of the supreme rank of both elec- 
tricity and photography as resources of art and science as 
we observe the transcendent powers 
Rontgen Rays and their cvokcd by their uniou. From this union 
Kindred. ^^ issue is morc extraordinary, more 

weighty with meaning and promise, than 
the X-ray pictures due to Professor Wilhelm Konrad Ront- 
gen. In these pictures he has but crowned labours which be- 
gan when Sir John Herschel noticed that a peculiar blue light 
was diffused from a perfectly colourless solution of quinine 
sulphate. Professor (now Sir) George Stokes explained the 
phenomenon by showing that this blue light consists of vi- 
brations originally too rapid to be visible, which are slowed 
down within the limits of perceptibility as they pass through 
the liquid. A sheet of paper moistened with a solution 
of quinine sulphate lends itself to a simple and striking ex- 
periment : let a spectrum be directed upon it, and the rays 
beyond the violet, originally invisible, shine forth with a 
bluish-green light. 

Other substances were early observed to possess this 
quality, among them Devonshire fluor-spar, whence the 
property is called ** fluorescence." Glass stained with ura- 
nium exhibits it in a remarkable degree, but in this category 
a rank even higher is held by platino-cyanide of barium. 
Fluorescence lasts only during stimulation by an impinging 
beam of light; cut that ofif and at once the shining ceases — 
just as in the case of an extinguished candle. There is a 
similar kind of glow which continues long after an exciting 
beam of light has been withdrawn, when the phenomena 
merge into phosphorescence — first studied by M. Alexandre 
Edmond Becquerel of Paris. If, to take a common case, a 
lump of calcium sulphide is exposed to the sun for a few 
minutes, and carried into a dark room, it maintains its glow 
for another minute or longer. This compound, when 
joined to a trace of bismuth and other ingredients, forms 



RONTGEN'S PRECURSORS 349 

Balmain's luminous paint, which has remarkable phospho- 
rescent power. Exposed to sunshine and kept in- total 
darkness for six weeks, it has, nevertheless, been able to 
fog a photographic film. Specimens of lime, after ex- 
posure to the spark of a Leyden jar, have been found to 
give out light when heated after having been four years in 
the dark. Phosphorescence and fluorescence are now found 
to be of the same family as the X ray and many other 
radiations known to us only indirectly. The single name 
" luminescence " is bestowed upon the whole group. What 
gives them peculiar interest is that all are excitable in ex- 
treme degrees by electricity of high tension. 

One path of approach to the achievement of Profes- 
sor Rontgen was opened by Sir John Herschel ; another, 
as important, was blazed and broadened by Professor (now 
Sir) William Crookes. In 1874 and 1875 he was engaged 
upon the researches which gave the world the radiometer, 
the tiny mill whose vanes rotate with rays of light or heat. 
The action of this mill depends upon its being placed in a 
glass bulb almost vacuous. When such a bulb incloses 
rubies, bits of phenakite, or other suitable objects, and 
electrical discharges are directed upon them, they glow 
with the most brilliant luminescence known to art. Ex- 
cited by a cathode ray, that is, a ray from the negative pole 
of an electrical machine, a Crookes bulb itself shines with 
a vivid golden green ray which reminds the onlooker of 
the fluorescence of earlier experiments. What a Crookes 
bulb is we shall see in the course of this chapter. 

Year by year the list of substances excitable to lumin- 
osity in a Crookes bulb has been lengthened, and in 1894 
it was the good fortune of Professor Philipp Lenard to 
discover a wonderful power of such a bulb. Emerging 
from it was a cathode ray which passed nearly as freely 
through a thin plate of aluminium as common sunshine does 
through a pane of glass (Fig. 89). Hertz had, a few years 



350 THE CAMERA AND ELECTRICITY 

previously, discovered that metals in very thin sheets were 
virtually transparent (or, to use Mr. Hyndman's term, 
transradiable) to his electric waves. This property was 
found by Professor Lenard to extend to the cathode ray 



Fig. 89. 
Lenard tube. W, aluminium window. 

and in a much higher degree. Gold- and silver-foil let the 
rays pass through with almost undiminished intensity. 

Especially brilliant are the fluorescent and phosphorescent 
effects excited by these rays; the platino-cyanides, the 
phosphides of the alkaline earths, calc-spar and uranium 
glass, are among the substances which glow brightest under 
their stimulus. They act with energy upon a photographic 
plate, over which is laid a sheet of cardboard one-eighth of 
an inch in thickness — this with an exposure of two minutes. 
The ultra-violet ray of ordinary light has the singular 
power of causing the gases which it may traverse to be- 
come conductors of electricity, with the effect of discharging 
an electrified metallic plate ; this property is shared by cath- 
ode rays. Associated with them are the ra)AS of still more 
extraordinary powers, discovered by Professor Rontgen. 
In his own words let his achievement be recounted, as pub- 
lished in McClure s Magazine, April, i 



" I have been for a long time interested in the problem of the 
cathode rays from a vacuum tube as studied by Hertz and Le- 
nard. I had followed their and other researches with great in- 
terest, and determined, as soon as I had the time, to make some 
researches of my own. This time I found at the close of last 
October. I had been at work for some days when I discovered 
something new." 



RONTGEN'S STORY 351 

*'What was the date?" 

'' The 8th of November." 

" And what was the discovery? " 

" I was working with a Crookes tube covered by a shield of 
black cardboard. A, piece of barium platino-cyanide paper lay 
on the bench there. . I had been passing a current through the 
tube, and I noticed a peculiar black line across the paper." 

"What of that?" 

" The effect was one which could only be produced, in ordi- 
nary parlance, by the passage of light. No light could come from 
the tube, because the shield which covered it was impervious to 
any hght known, even that of the electric arc." 

" And what did you think? " 

" I did not think ; I investigated. I assumed that the effect 
must have come from the tube, since its character indicated that 
it could come from nowhere else. I tested it. In a few minutes 
there was no doubt about it. Rays were coming from the tube 
which had a luminescent effect upon the paper. I tried it success- 
fully at greater and greater distances, even at two metres. It 
seemed at first a new kind of invisible hght. It was clearly some- 
thing new, something unrecorded." 

"Is it hght?" 

" No." 

" Is it electricity? " 

" Not in any known form." 

''What is it?" 

" I don't know." 

And the discoverer of the X rays thus stated as calmly his 
ignorance of their essence as has everybody else who has written 
on the phenomena thus far. 

" Having discovered the existence of a new kind of rays, I of 
course began to investigate what they would do." He took up 
a series of cabinet-sized photographs. " It soon appeared from 
tests that the rays had penetrative power to a degree hitherto un- 
known. They penetrated paper, wood, and cloth with ease ; and 
the thickness of the substance made no perceptible difference, 
within reasonable limits." He showed photographs of a box of 
laboratory weights of platinum, aluminium, and brass, they and the 
brass hinges all having been photographed from a closed box, 
without any indication of the box. Also a photograph of a coil 
of fine wire, wound on a wooden spool, the wire having been 
photographed and the wood omitted. 

"The rays," he continued, "passed through all the metals 
tested, with a facility varying, roughly speaking, with the density 
of the metal. These phenomena I have discussed carefully in 
my report to the Wiirzburg Society, and you will find all the tech- 



352 THE CAMERA AND ELECTRICITY 

nical results therein stated." He showed a photograph of a small 
sheet of zinc. This was composed of smaller plates soldered 
laterally with solders of different metallic proportions. The differ- 
ing lines of shadow caused by the difference in the solders were 
visible evidence that a new means of detecting flaws and chemi- 
cal variations in metals had been found. A photograph of a 
compass showed the needle and dial taken through the closed 
brass cover. The markings of the dial were in red metallic paint, 
and thus interfered with the rays, and were reproduced. ** Since 
the rays had this great penetrative power, it seemed natural that 
they should penetrate flesh, and so it proved in photographing 
the hand, as I showed you." 

For twenty years before their detection the X rays had 
been created in experiments vv^ith the Crookes bulbs. 
Rontgen's great discovery was no accident. He was 
at the time studying the phenomena of luminescence, 
as well as those of electricity pure and simple; this 
accounts for his having at hand the telltale screen 
of barium platino-cyanide, which showed the peculiar 




Fig. 90. 
Crookes tube photographing the bones of a hand. 

black streak, excitable only by rays of known or 
unknown species. Without the trained intelligence to 
observe an unusual phenomenon so slight in degree, and 
follow it up patiently to its cause, the X rays would have 
fallen as vainly across his laboratory that memorable No- 
vember morning as they had often before traversed the 
work-rooms of other investigators. As we glanced at the 



NEW SURGICAL RESOURCES 353 

astronomical conquests of the camera, we saw that they 
declare the firmament to be not only much vaster but also 
more diversified in its tenantry than was supposed a gen- 
eration ago. So, too, with the realm of nature near at 
hand. The ultra-violet ray is found to have properties 
more searching than those of common Hght; the cathode 
ray is discovered to be more penetrating still ; and partnered 
with it is a distinct emission which casts shadows of bone 
through solid flesh, of gold or lead through a wooden 
coffer. It is this outdoing of the beam studied by Le- 
nard that so quickly gave the X ray its world-wide fame 
(Fig. 90). 

The photographer, like the draughtsman, had long 
been content to delineate surfaces solely. It is only the 
rare talent of an Alma-Tadema that can simulate translu- 
cency with the brush, and cozen the eye into believing that 
it peers below the glinting of a marble fountain or a wall. 
Provided with a Rontgen bulb, the photographer passes 
from the exterior to the interior of an object, almost as if 
he were a sorcerer with power to transmute all things to 
glass. Equipped with a simple X-ray apparatus, disloca- 
tions and fractures are detected by the surgeon, diseases 
of bones are studied, and shot, needles, and bits of glass 
or corroding wire within the muscles of a patient are lo- 
cated with exactitude. Thanks to the work of Mr. Mac- 
kenzie Davidson, the like detection of renal calculi can be 
looked forward to with a fair degree of certainty. The 
same means of exploration offers equal aid to medicine : 
it demonstrates the calcification of arteries, and aneurisms 
of the heart or of the first part of the aorta; with improved 
methods it may be possible to study fatty degenerations of 
the arteries and larger blood-vessels. Dr. C. M. Mouillin, 
addressing the Rontgen Society of London as its presi- 
dent, states that the fluorescent screen has now reached 
such a degree of perfection that the minutest movement of 



354 THE CAMERA AND ELECTRICITY 

the heart and lungs, and the least change in the action of 
the diaphragm, can be watched and studied at leisure in the 
living subject. He considers it probable that the exami- 
nation of a patient's chest with this screen may become as 
much a matter of common routine as with the stethoscope 
to-day. A forecast more recent still points to the possi- 
bility of committing X-ray impressions to kinetographic 
films, this with intent to further the resources of medical 
instruction. 

Scanned by this new detecter, the dead as well as the 
living tell their secrets. In the Museum of Natural His- 
tory at Vienna there is an Egyptian mummy which is hu- 
man in form, but which from its inscriptions was taken to 
be that of an ibis. It is, however, so rare and valuable an 
object that it was not thought advisable to quiet doubts 
by removing its wrappings — with the inevitable risk of 
damage. On being subjected to the X rays the mummy 
disclosed the unquestionable outlines of a large ibis-like 
skeleton. 

An extension of the utility of X rays would seem to lie 
in employing extreme electrical pressures and the closest 
possible approach to a perfect vacuum in the bulb. Pro- 
fessor John Trowbridge has found that with 3,000,000 
volts a single discharge through highly rarefied media pro- 
duces X rays powerful enough to photograph the bones of 
the hand in one-millionth of a second. In the operative 
surgery and medicine of the nineteenth century the X rays 
take a place of honour side by side with anaesthesia and the 
antiseptic treatment due to Pasteur and Lister. In the 
study of the phenomena of growth these rays are inform- 
ing in a new way. Pigs and other domestic animals have 
been photographed day by day from birth, clearly showing 
the result of various courses of feeding on the formation of 
flesh and bone. In a totally distinct field of inquiry, X rays 
are employed to detect slate and other admixtures in coal. 



OPACITY NON-EXISTENT 355 

Slate is comparatively opaque and coal transparent to these 
impulses. 

Professor Rdntgen's success has spun a thread which 
unites many researches in contiguous fields. In 1896 M. 
Henri Becquerel and Professor Silvanus 

P. Thompson independently found that other Luminescence. 

certain salts of uranium — for example, 
the nitrate of uranyl and the fluoride of uranium and am- 
monium — emit invisible radiations which easily pass through 
aluminium and produce on a photographic plate images of 
interposed objects comparatively opaque. This effect, says 
Professor Thompson, *' appears to be due to an invisible 
phosphorescence of a persistent sort." Some time after- 
ward M. Becquerel observed that uranium by itself far 
surpasses any of its compounds in this weird property, 
emitting rays continuously and with apparently undimin- 
ished intensity for more than a year. 

In 1898 and 1899 M. and Mme. Curie announced 
their discovery in pitch-blende of two new substances, 
radium and polonium, both having much greater radio- 
activity than uranium. Dr. W. J. Russell, of the Davy- 
Faraday Laboratory, London, has greatly extended the study 
of rays not directly visible. He has observed photographic 
effects from bright zinc, from wood, charcoal, and paper; all 
of which seem to be due to the formation of peroxide of 
hydrogen during the photographic process. So active is 
this peroxide that one part diluted with a million parts of 
water is capable of giving a picture. With rays emitted 
by sugar, after they had pierced a block of wood two and 
a half inches thick, Mr. A. F. McKissick has photographed 
coins, keys, and pieces of glass. So far as known at present, 
there are neither Rontgen nor Becquerel rays in sunlight, 
but M. Gustave le Bon has shown that the solar beam has 
a power of permeation somewhat allied to the Rontgen 
and Becquerel phenomena. He finds that if sunshine falls 



356 THE CAMERA AND ELECTRICITY 

upon a thin sheet of iron covering a negative and a sensi- 
tive plate, the plate gives a normal, though weak positive 
on development.^ 

Manifestly, the unseen universe which enfolds us is 
steadily being brought to the light of day. The investi- 
gations of Hertz established that the 
The Unseen Universe. Hght-waves which affect the eye are but 
one octave in a gamut which sweeps in- 
definitely far both above and below them. In his hands, 
as in those of Joseph Henry long before, electric waves 
found their way through the walls and floors of a house; 
in the Marconi telegraph these waves pass through the 
earth or a fog, a mist or a rain-storm, with little or no hin- 
drance. What does all this mean ? Nothing less than that, 
given its accordant ray, any substance whatever is perme- 
able, and that, therefore, to communicate between any two 
places in the universe is simply a question of providing the 
right means. And limited in range though the visual 
faculty of man may be, he is fast ascertaining how to treat 
an invisible ray so as to bring its image to view. If the 
wave in its original path eludes his eye, it cannot strike 
his photographic plate without leaving its impress — to be 
examined at leisure. In photographic chemistry enough 
has been done to make it entirely probable that no ray 
undulates through space that is not matched by some com- 
pound or other which it has power to shake apart. Small 
and feeble though the hand of man may be, it yet holds 
clues to every maze in the universe — clues through which 
the unseen may be perceived, the silent given a voice, the 
impalpable rise to touch. The day seems at hand when 
every undulation of heat and sound, with all the waves in- 

1 Much interesting detail is recorded in Light, Visible and Invisible, by 
Silvanus P. Thompson, London and New York, Macmillan, 1897; in Radia- 
tion, by H. H. F. Hyndman, London, Sonnenschein, and New York, Mac- 
millan, 1898 ; also in appendices to Signalling WitJioict Wires, by Oliver J. 
Lodge, third edition, London, The Electrician Co., 1900. 



GOOD IN EVERYTHING 357 

termedlate and beyond, will depict themselves for studious 
investigation. 

And let it not be forgotten that these revelations took 
their rise in what was at first resented as an intrusion. 
When the ultra-violet ray impressed it- 
self upon the earHest photographic plates The intruder is a 
it so seriously deranged the translation of Fnend. 

colour that, if possible, the photographer 
would have banished it at once and forever. Yet that in- 
truding ray has proved to be a friend, not only generous in 
gifts of its own, but pointing to other and greater wealth 
fast being won from darkness to light. When the solar 
spectrum is thrown upon a sensitive plate it is in the violet 
and ultra-violet region that the principal change occurs. It 
is in asking, What more? that so much has been rescued 
from the Unknown, not only within the play of the spec- 
trum of the sun, but also in spheres of radiation that seem 
to have little or nothing in common with the solar beam. 

Again recurs the truth that no property of matter exists, 
though at first it may seem merely strange and useless, but 
holds the richest meaning for the explorer. For a good many 
years the examination of fluorescent substances might have 
seemed futile enough. What is the good, the practical 
man might have asked, of showing me the bluish light into 
which you convert rays otherwise unseen ? Professor 
Rontgen has answered that question, and the vast field of 
research in which he is the most conspicuous figure may 
bear harvests quite as rich as his in the early years of the 
twentieth century. We have learned that light may be 
freely radiated without the company of heat — as in the 
familiar gleam of the glow-worm and the firefly. Is it too 
much to expect that art will pursue nature to yet another 
fastness, and so economically create light in her own 
method that the gross waste of the electric lamps of to-day 
may soon cease to reproach the physicist? 



358 THE CAMERA AND ELECTRICITY 

But let us descend from these high anticipations to 
unions of electric and photographic art already accom- 

pHshed and highly fruitful. In places 

Union of the Camera iuaccessiblc to daylight, and anywhere 

and the Electric Lamp. ^^ night, the clectric beam, instead of 

the sun, is at the camera's service. In 
1890 a landslide took place at Chancelade, in France, 
overwhelming a quarry in which labourers were at work. 
Fortunately a chink remained in the rock and rubbish, 
which, small as it was, admitted a camera with its electric 
lamp and wire. Informed by its pictures, the imprisoned 
men were traced and speedily rescued. To pass from help 
in accident to aid in disease : Dr. Edward O. Schaaf of 
Newark, New Jersey, in 1897, devised a camera and lamp 
by which he has repeatedly photographed small areas of 
the mucous membrane of the stomach, a branch of diag- 
nosis in which progress is also reported from Germany. 

The independence of air enjoyed by the electric light 
bestows upon the sensitive plate the freedom of the ocean 
depths, or admits it to mines vitiated by fire-damp beyond 
the endurance of human lungs. In surveying the river 
beds from which the piers of bridges are to rise, and the 
surf-swept beaches on which telegraph cables are to be laid, 
the electric lamp and its twin, the camera, are becoming 
indispensable to the engineer. The perfect mechanical con- 
trol introduced by electricity enables a war-time photog- 
rapher, at the safe end of a wire, to send his camera aloft 
under a balloon or a kite, effectively playing the spy. In a 
registry which commenced in purely scientific curiosity, and 
which to-day serves not only the astronomer but the fore- 
caster of weather, a luminous beam is a pencil without weight 
which records from instant to instant variations in magnetic 
dip and inclination, the electrical condition of the air, the force 
and direction of the oscillations which herald or accompany 
an earthquake= In its simplest form this kind of apparatus 



NEEDLESS ALARM 359 

is a cylinder of sensitised paper which performs a revolu- 
tion in twenty-four hours. A dot of light streaming from 
a fluctuating instrument is constantly writing on the sensi- 
tive surface of the paper the path or the pressure to be 
recorded. 

A simple automatic recorder of earthquakes might once 
have saved Australia from alarm bordering on panic. 
One night, a few years ago, all the three cables uniting that 
country with the rest of the world suddenly parted. As 
there was on land no perceptible shock of earthquake, the 
disaster was suspected to be the work of an invading foe. 
The troops were immediately placed under arms, and with 
energy and haste all the machinery of resistance was over- 
hauled and made ready. All this was needless, for it was 
soon ascertained that the ocean bed adjoining the continent 
had suddenly moved just enough to break the cables and 
do no further damage. Because an instrument of ordinary 
delicacy was lacking to register this simple fact, some three 
million souls saw reason to dread an armed invader. 

At the close of Chapter XIV we noted the exquisite 
apparatus which writes in ink a cable message as it issues 
from beneath the sea. An electric impulse even feebler 
may be recorded photographically as it sways a receiving- 
needle. This feat may play a part in cheapening the 
cable soon to be laid across the Pacific — for a distance 
longer than has yet been attempted by the telegraphic 
engineer. 

Astronomers in their direct use of the eye are troubled 
by "the personal equation," such as the observer's anticipa- 
tion or delay in noting the instant of a 
phenomenon. To eliminate this source The Personal Equation 
of error is the purpose of an invention and its Remedy, 
by the Rev. George A. Fargis, of the 
Georgetown Observatory in Washington. An electri- 
cally driven clock moves a sensitised sheet of paper, catch- 



36o THE CAMERA AND ELECTRICITY 

ing the image of a star at the instant of its passage across 
the wires of a telescope — the time of transit being simul- 
taneously recorded (Fig. 91), In a widely remote sphere, 
that of animal movement, mention has been made of Mr. 
Muybridge's remarkable pictures. It was only by having 
electrical control of his cameras that those pictures were 




Fig. 91. 
Fargis recorder. 

secured. There are motions swifter still to be depicted, but 
none of them so swift as to elude the sensitive plate." Turn- 
ing upon its ally electricity, it makes plain its most devious 
paths, its most abrupt discharges. Lightning, natural 
and artificial, in every phase, has left its imprint in the 
camera (Plate XXII). 

The phenomena of sound, less exacting in point of time, 
have, of course, not evaded the photographer. Dr. Raps 

of Berlin has pictured the vibrations of 
'^^'''^s'o?nT''''°^ an organ pipe, of a hunting-horn, as 

well as the singing of the vowels. Pro- 
fessor Boltzmann, and other investigators of mark, have de- 
picted the complex curves of the telephone in oscillations 
as rapid as 3000 in a second. At the London Exhibition 
of 1862 Rudolph Koenig made public his beautiful draw- 
ings of flames, excited to sympathy with sounds. From 
the difficulty of following so great a master of the pencil 
as he, his method was little cultivated by men of research. 
By good fortune, the motion of flame as it rises and 
falls under the impact of sound is, comparatively speaking, 
slow ; thus one of the first phenomena to be observed by 
primitive man lends itself to the most modern methods of 




By II. A. Beasley, Walbrook, Baltimore, Maryland. 




XXII. From the PJiotograpkic Tii/ws, January, jgoo. 

By J. H. Dunn, New York. 
PHOTOGRAPHS OF LIGHTNING. 



NEW SOUND PICTURES 



361 



depiction. A photographic plate is moved behind the lens 
of a camera at such a rate that during each vibration of a 
flame the plate advances by a space at least twice as great as 
the width of the flame. With such an apparatus Professor 
Ernest Merritt of Cornell University, in 1893, found it just 
possible to photograph the flames delineated by Koenig.^ In 
1897, jointly with Professor Edward F. Nichols, he used an 
improved camera, with acetylene as an illuminant instead of 
common gas. The photographs were now defined much bet- 
ter than those of four years before. Professor Nichols says : 

When we attempt to read such a record, as one would read 
the trace of the siphon recorder in a telegraphic message, or as 
one would read shorthand, we find that it is only the vowels that 
produce any marked agitation of the flame. All those accompa- 
nying mouth sounds which introduce and close each syllable in 
articulate speech, and by which, in great measure, we are able to 
distinguish the different words, produce a very feeble and often an 
unrecognisable effect upon the flame. The records are indeed the 
very opposite of shorthand writing, not only that instead of a sin- 



'/Aj/ibUfuU/uajuU/uUU 



Fig. 92. 
The sound oi A flat photographed from a manometric flame. 

gle character to a syllable we have sometimes as many as a hun- 
dred oscillations of the flame, but likewise in the fact that while 
shorthand is made up of words with the vowels left out, these 
photographs represent speech with the consonants suppressed. 
. . . Not only are the subtile differences which distinguish the 
vowel sounds uttered by persons speaking various dialects mani- 
fested by differences in the flame groupings, but the individual 
peculiarities in the utterance of different speakers using the same 
dialect are plainly discernible (Fig. 92).^ 

1 Physical Revieiu, Vol. I, p. 166. ^ Nature, VoL LIX, p. 321. 



362 THE CAMERA AND ELECTRICITY 

If it ever becomes possible to decipher this sound-script 
We shall come to the same goal as that of the phonograph 
— and by a very different path. 

Photography with a plate in swift motion is one of the 
most searching instruments of exploration at the physicist's 
command. All that the astronomer and 
Time Infinitesimal, the mctcorologist accompHsh with a sen- 
sitive plate is carried to a new scene 
when the telltale changes in the strength of a current are 
caught in minute subdivisions of time. A curve-writing 
volt-meter may be made to give records on a moving plate 
running to within the thousandth of a second of the in- 
stant when such a process as electrolysis, electrolytic polar- 
isation, voltaic action, or the charge or discharge of a con- 
denser begins.^ Now that electricity and photography 
march forward in the same yoke, they promise us insights 
of superlative importance. It is what occurs in less than 
the twinkling of an eye, the effects of contact, the unions 
and partings of molecules, that most concern the modern 
inquirers in the fields of physics and chemistry. If these 
phenomena are ever imaged upon photographic films, in- 
vestigators will possess no merely curious pictures, but 
plain hints for the further extension of human sway over 
both matter and motion. 

We have now come to the end of our hasty review of 

the principal feats of photography in its aid to science, art, 

and hterature — in its furtherance, not un- 

The Eye of Art far Tran- important, of uew rccrcatiou. If elec- 

scends the Eye of ... . 

Nature. tricity m the nmeteenth century has 

advanced art and science by leaps and 

bounds, hardly less decisive is the impulse due to its sister 

force, light, as a universal limner and explorer. The first 

1 Address on the "Phenomena of the Time Infinitesimal," by Professor 
E. L. Nichols before Section B,— physics,— American Association for the 
Advancement of Science, 1893. 



AN ALL-BEHOLDING EYE 363 

tasks of the photographer lay in creating a plate which 
should approach as nearly as possible to the powers of the 
eye and the hand — in true representation of form, of colour, 
of relief, of motion. His later work is crowned by the 
production of plates which far transcend the capability of 
vision in being quicker, more persistent, and in having a 
susceptibility to rays which fall upon the retina only to 
prove it blind ; while every impression becomes as per- 
manent as ink can make it. Thus the most exquisite of all 
the senses is enlarged in scope as no other is, or ever may 
be. The modern camera, moreover, lends itself to forms 
of reproduction totally new in their verity, beauty, and 
cheapness, so that the photographer has ushered in nothing 
less than the democracy of art. While he brings many an 
ancient aptitude to a new fruitfulness, he also creates a 
thousand novel modes of attack upon the infinite Unknown. 



CHAPTER XXV 



LANGUAGE 



THAT our ancestors were capital draughtsmen long be- 
fore they came to articulate speech is probable from the 
extreme antiquity of excellent pictures, and from abun- 
dant proof that spoken language is a 
Much to See, Little Comparatively recent acquisition. Why 
to Hear. |-]^g ^^^ q£ ^j^g dcpictcr may have long pre- 

ceded that of the speaker we can easily 
understand. Let us ask a primitive wanderer to live over 
again a day of his life for us, and the reason will be sunshine 
clear. As he roams about from dawn to dusk in quest of 
food he passes from thicket to plain, from plain to swamp, 
from swamp to sea-shore — with all their variety of changing 
scenes. Here he catches a glimpse of a bunch of alluring 
grapes, there he sees a bush laden with nuts, anon he de- 
tects the spreading leaves which betoken a root easily dug 
from the beach — and all the livelong day hardly once does 
the man hear a sound that bears him a message. If a 
cricket chirps what matters it to him ? If a bird trills a 
few notes, the roulade is addressed, not to his ears, but to 
those of its mate. Such beasts of prey as lurk in the tall 
grasses of the swamp, or in the underbrush of the woods, 
find their account in a tread of the stealthiest, in a silence , 
rarely broken except at the season of espousal. It is not 
in listening for a grunt, or a yelp, so much as in watching 

364 



" GO " 365 

for a telltale footprint, that the man keeps himself safe 
from these foes. And hence, because his livelihood and his 
life depend almost wholly upon his sight, and scarcely at 
all upon his hearing, his eyes concern themselves with the 
art of representation long before his ears take part in the 
work of bringing the absent into the here, and making 
the past re-transact itself in the now.^ 

In Chapter XIX we endeavoured to recall some of the 
principal steps by which the modeller and the depicter be- 
gan their tasks. The free and skilful hand, indispensable 
to both those artists, did much more early in the human 
day than mould the clay for a rude effigy, or draw in 
sand the profile of a chief. Dogs and ants, together with 
many brutes and insects much less intelligent, can give 
signals which mean, '' Come with me," but the hand of a 
primitive fire-kindler as it pointed to a dwindling blaze, 
and then to the forest whence a junior was desired to fetch 
more fuel, could signify, '* Go," a message often of much 
more consequence, and a message to which the mere brute 
has never risen. In like manner a primitive mother could 
show her young the berries or the nuts so much hidden by 
leaves on a distant bush as to elude the little ones' gaze ; 
or a sentinel with the safety of silence could point out to 
his companions the crouching tiger otherwise unseen. 
His simple gesture said " tiger" almost as plainly as when 
to-day a visitor to a zoological garden utters the word. 
That there is a close correspondence between the infancy 
of the race and that of a modern child every cradle bears 

1 A question which might well engage the thought of a musical scholar is, 
Why is great music so recent? Why did Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner follow 
so long after Phidias and Praxiteles, and the inventors of the five orders of 
classical architecture? Does part of the explanation reside in the fact that for 
ages there was more for man to see than to hear, so that the cultivation of 
hearing lingered after that of vision? For ocons the eye could " dismount 
the highest star," while the ear had not heard its chief message — the word — 
because human lips were still to be unsealed. 



366 LANGUAGE 

witness. Weeks before a babe can say a syllable, ask it, 
*' Where is mama?" and the little eyes and hands may 
move forward in the reply, ''There." 

From the beginning man must have had in common 
with other animals some powers of vocal expression, and 
more ample than theirs because he had more to express. 
His cries at first probably denoted the simplest and 
strongest appetites and feelings, — hunger, pain, rage, and 
the like, — rising in due time to a chatter such as that by 
which existing anthropoids signify comfort, greetings, en- 
dearment. Professor Shaler has remarked how much more 
varied and expressive are the voices of dogs reared for gen- 
erations by civilised men than the few and simple barkings 
of dogs in the camps of savages.-^ One of the decisive 
characteristics of the race now human consists in its faculty 
of imitation, and this must have early borne a part in 
enlarging the utterances of man. We have noted how at 
the outset of graphic representation the limner imitated the 
profile of a human head, or the contour of a horse. Long 
afterward the simulation of sounds was to play an equally 
important role in leading to language by an appeal to the 
ear instead of to the eye. In one case as in the other the 
beginnings may have been matters of sheer sport. In 
rearing lambs, and the young foxes and wolves from which 
dogs may be descended, there was an incitement to imitate 
bleating and snarling, especially on the part of children. 
Proficiency in this art could easily extend itself to repeat- 
ing the utterances of beasts of prey. The talent which 
began in sketching the outline of a bear came to a rightful 
succession when a mimic amused himself in echoing the 
growl of the beast. Suppose such a mimic to be a watcher 
on the lookout from the topmost branch of an oak. He 
detects in the distance the ambling figure of a bear. His 

1 Domesticated Animals, Their Relation to Man and to His Advancement in 
Civilisation, by N. S. Shaler. New York, Scribner, 1895. 



ONLY MAN CAN NAME 367 

comrades to whom he points out the animal fail to descry 
it. He imitates the growl of the slinking brute — at once his 
comrades know what to look for. They turn their eyes from 
the trees to the ground and see the bear distinctly. 

Here emerges the naming faculty unshared by man with 
any other creature. Many animals utter cries of alarm, 
but the sentinel with wit enough to 
mimic a cry so as to indicate the beast The Naming Faculty, 
which utters that cry has taken a leap 
which divides him and his race forever from animals ex- 
pert enough in mere warning or mimicry, but lacking 
the intelligence which impresses sounds into a means 
of naming. Uncounted species high and low in the 
scale of Hfe are able to utter the wail of pain, the whine 
of fear; man alone can plainly tell what has caused his 
pain, what excites his dread. New avenues of escape from 
danger, new means of advantage, and new sources of social 
cheer, came to men so soon as they could utter a name, in 
however imperfect a fashion. Here the language of the 
hand began to be supplemented in the most useful way, 
and in many cases altogether replaced. To quote Professor 
Whitney : ** The voice is on the whole the most available 
means of communication. It acts with the least expendi- 
ture of effort. It leaves the hands, much more variously 
efficient and hard-worked members, at leisure for other 
work at the same time ; and it most easily compels attention 
from any direction."^ A scout, invisible in darkness, fog, 
or tempest, could now easily bid his fellows find their way 
to a cave, or warn them to avoid a clump of trees where a 
foe lurked in ambush. 

Alliances between gesture and speech, between mimicry 
and names, which date back to the very birth of human 
language, have their reminders before us at this hour. An 
orator recounts the details of a shipwreck in which he was a 

1 Life and Growth of Language, International Scientific Series, p. 293. 



368 LANGUAGE 

sufferer — and his hands are only less eloquent than his 

tongue. A child points to a cow in its pasture and says, 

" Moo-moo," by way of a name. When 

pontaneous tter- ^j^^ little One comcs to towu from its 
home in the country it tells how a loco- 
motive was its carrier by saying, " Shoo-shoo," and turning 
its arms in imitation of the engine's revolving wheels. 
We spe^k of the ''cuckoo," the *' peetweet," the " whip- 
poorwill," the ''katydid," in names which they themselves 
have suggested to us. Hundreds of other common 
terms — " crackle," " sizzle," " buzz," " whir," and the like— 
testify every day to the debt that sense owes to sound, to 
the important contribution by onomatopoeia to the mintage 
of words. Another well-spring of speech deserves a mo- 
ment's heed. A few syllabic sounds mount of themselves 
to the lips of a babe, and these, at first by their seniors, 
are taken to mean definite persons and things. Sir John 
Lubbock has ascertained that "pa" and "ma" are among 
the very first because the easiest utterances of a child ; 
and " pa " and " ma " have long been appropriated by 
parents to signify themselves. All young children have 
difficulty in repeating their own names ; for months Stella 
may call herself " Cally," and George may say that he is 
" Joe," simply because their powers of articulation are but 
little developed. By reducing the long words of their 
elders to pronounceable form, and by downright invention, 
— based upon spontaneous sounds, — children have been 
known to devise long vocabularies for themselves. In so 
doing they have undoubtedly shed light on one of the 
methods by which early speech began. 

When primitive man had advanced somewhat in the fac- 
ulty of naming we can imagine him passing from things to 
the quahties of things. Terms such as " warm," " cold," 
"wet," "dry," "long," "short," would spring to his lips 
— at first perhaps connected with the objects usually pre- 



SOUNDS MEAN MORE AND MORE 369 

seating a specific quality in a striking degree. In com- 
mon parlance to-day we speak of a thing *' as dry as a 
bone," or *' as cold as ice." When a deaf- 
mute wishes to signify ''red" he pro- The Adjective and 

trudes his tongue and touches it with his 
finger.^ In the language of gesture the 
arms are slightly bent and rapidly flapped to mean '' bird " ; 
but the same sign has to serve for ''flight," or "flying," 
and which of the three meanings is intended to be con- 
veyed must be judged by the onlooker from the rest of the 
story. Early in the formation of articulate speech there 
must have been the setting apart a sound to signify what 
a person or a thing does, in addition to what the person or 
thing is ; the verb was created in succession to the adjec- 
tive and the noun. Then slowly from the adjective and 
the verb there arose the power to name such conceptions 
as "good" and "right," which end at last in the highly 
abstract terms of the man of science, the philosopher, the 
metaphysician. There was inestimable gain in the steadily 
growing power to symbolise by sounds as well as by 
graphic delineation. Ideas became more tenacious when 
they were rooted in the memory both through the ear and 
the eye — as every student discovers anew when he learns 
a foreign tongue both in speech and in print. But let the 
art of gestural or graphic depiction rise as high as it can, 

1 In its achievement of lip-reading the art of communication returns in most 
ingenious fashion to something of its first estate. As the ages of human prog- 
ress have succeeded each other, the misfortune of deafness has meant more 
and more of deprivation. For the aid of the deaf-mute an elaborate code of 
manual and gestural signs was long ago contrived. It has been the life-work 
of Professor Alexander Melville Bell and other eminent teachers virtually to 
unstop deaf ears, and unloosen the tongues of the dumb by a happy and origi- 
nal impressment of sight. The system is based upon the close observation 
of the moving lips of a speaker, whose words are known through the slight 
and wholly incidental movements which accompany their utterance. Then, 
to supplement this hearing by the eye, the lips of the dumb are patiently in- 
structed to imitate the motions of speech, with the effect of distinct articulation. 



370 LANGUAGE 

it soon comes to rigid limits only to be overpassed by- 
vocal utterance. What scheme of manual signs could 
interpret Kant's Critique of Pttre Reason, or Herbert 
Spencer's First Principles} So profound are the obli- 
gations of thought to language that Professor Max Miiller 
maintains that thought and language are identical. He says : 
*' Words without thought are dead sounds ; thoughts with- 
out words are nothing ; to think is to speak low, to speak 
is to think aloud." ^ Another eminent philologist, Wilhelm 
Bleek, has said : 

It is through language and by language that man, as a think- 
ing being, has developed himself. It is communication by means 
of speech that brings his thinking to greater clearness, by bringing 
the different modes of thought into mutual furthering communi- 
cation with each other. By means of speech man is able to" hold 
with more tenacity the impressions already obtained, and thus 
better to combine the old with those whose action is fresher, and 
generally each with every other, and to work them up into intui- 
tion. It is the spring of self-consciousness inasmuch as it enables 
man to distinguish himself and his emotions from the external 
world, and so to become conscious of both. Thus it is only by 
means of it that true development of thought can take place. 
Wilhelm von Humboldt said in his last letter to Goethe: "The 
entire possession of ideas is just what we, placed outside of our- 
selves, can cause to pass over into others." ^ 

Professor William D. Whitney, the foremost American 
philologist of his time, tells us : 

It is not easy to estimate the advantage won by the mind in 
the obtaining of a language. Its confused impressions are thus 
reduced to order, brought under the distinct review of conscious- 
ness, and within reach of reflection ; an apparatus is provided with 
which it can work like an artisan with his tools. ... By as much 
as, supplied with tools, man can traverse space, handle and shape 
materials, frame textures, penetrate distance, observe the minute, 
beyond what he could compass with his unequipped physical 

1 Science of Language, Vol. I, p. 527. London and New York, 1891. 
For a criticism, see Max Miiller and the Science of Language, p. 26, by 
W. D. Whitney. New York, Appleton, 1892. 

2 On the Origin of Language, p. 43. Translated by Thomas Davidson. 
London and New York, 1869. 



SPEECH INCITES THOUGHT 371 

powers, by so much is the reach and grasp, the penetration and 
accuracy, of his thought increased by speech. This part of the 
value of speech is by no means easy to bring to full realisation, 
because our minds are so used to working by and through words 
that they cannot even conceive of the plight they would be in if 
deprived of such helps. But we may think, for example, of what 
the mathematician would be without figures and symbols.^ 

With this dictum of Professor Whitney's in mind, let us 
try to add together ten lines, each bearing a number ex- 
pressed in ten Roman numerals. The feat is all but im- 
possible ; reduce the numbers to the Arabic notation and 
the task at once melts to a trifle. Thus does a simple and 
adequate symbolism promote the science and art of number. 
In that larger field of expression, language, the ability to 
denote general ideas by words has been a transcendent 
means of multiplying such ideas ; these more conclusively 
than ever have withdrawn man, the thinker, the abstract 
reasoner, from the lowly stock which remained inarticulate 
when he arrived at speech. Physiplogists of authority are 
in accord as to the extreme demands which language 
makes upon the powers of the brain. Nothing, they tell 
us, has done so much to increase cerebral weight and com- 
plexity as the development of articulate speech. It is, in- 
deed, that development which accounts for the largeness of 
brain which is distinctive of man. By way of prefacing a 
consideration of this point, let us note three of the most re- 
markable human skulls thus far unearthed. 

Among human fossils the most remarkable skulls are 
those, first, of the Cro-Magnon race of neolithic France; 
second, the Neanderthal cranium found 
near Diisseldorf ; and third, that of Pit he- Three Notable Skuiis. 
canthropiLS erecttis, discovered by Dr. 
Eugene Dubois in Java. In size and form the Cro-Magnon 
skulls denote that their possessors were men of remarkable 
intelligence, a view corroborated by the etchings on bone, 

1 Life and Growth of Language, p. 23. International Scientific Series. 



372 LANGUAGE 

wrought by these primitive artists, and found near their 
remains. Concerning the Neanderthal cranium, Professor 
Huxley said in Mans Place in Nature : 

Under whatever aspect we view this cranium, whether we re- 
gard its vertical depression, the enormous thickness of its supra- 
cihary ridges, its sloping occiput, or its long and straight 
squamosal suture, we meet with ape-like characters, stamping it 
as the most pithecoid of human crania yet discovered. 

This was said in i860. Thirty-four years later Dr. Dubois 
discovered the famous skull of Pithecanthropns erectns in 
Java. The next year, in 1895, at the International Zo- 
ological Congress, in Leyden, this skull, with the other re- 
mains found with it, were discussed by twelve experts. 
Three held them to belong to a low race of man ; . three 
declared them to be those of a man-Hke ape of great size; 
the rest maintained that they belonged to an intermediate 
form which directly connected primitive man with the 
anthropoid apes. ''This last view," says Professor 
Haeckel, ** is the right one, and accords with the laws of 
logical inference. Pithecanthropus erectus is truly a Plio- 
cene remainder of that famous group of highest catarrhines 
which were the immediate pithecoid ancestors of man."^ 

And now let us listen to an ethnologist of eminence who 
devoted his Hfe to the study of language. At the meet- 
ing of the American Association for the 
A Leap due to Language. Advancement of Scieuce in 1886, Mr. 
Horatio Hale delivered an address ** On 
the Origin of Languages and the Antiquity of Speaking 
Man." In the course of a review which summed up con- 
victions due to a lifetime of research, and which he sup- 
ported by much detailed evidence, he said : 

It is impossible to suppose that a people possessing the intel- 
lectual endowments of the Cro-Magnon race would long remain 

1 The Last Link. London, Adam & Charles Black ; New York, Macmillan 
& Co., 1898. 



SPEECH EXPLAINS A LEAP 373 

in an uncivilised state, if they were once placed in a country 
where the climate and other surroundings were favourable to the 
increase of population and to improvement in the arts of life. 
Even in the then rigorous climate and other hard conditions of 
western Europe, they had advanced, as Dr. Paul Broca declares, 
"to the very threshold of civilisation." What must they have 
become in Egypt and in southern Asia? In point of fact, during 
a comparatively brief space of time, ranging from five thousand 
to seven thousand years ago, the men of these regions developed 
in widely distant centres— in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, in Phoenicia, 
in northern India, and in China — a high and varied civilisation 
and culture, whose memorials, in their works of art and their lit- 
erature, astonish us at this day, and in some respects defy imita- 
tion. To what circumstance can we attribute this sudden and 
wonderful flowering of human genius, after countless ages of tor- 
pidity, but to the one all-sufficient cause — the acquisition of the 
power of speech? 

The particular impetus here may have lain in the mas- 
tery not only of some decisive access in articulate speech, 
but in a transition from mere portraiture to narrative pic- 
turing, such as the pictographs of the North American 
Indians collected and interpreted by the late Colonel Gar- 
rick Mallery.-^ By such a step forward records of a new 
significance and permanence might see the light. Know- 
ledge which before had died away in mere vocal utterance, 
or observed gesture, could now be graphically perpetuated ; 
at a stroke the casualties of oral tradition might begin 
to disappear. As writing gradually emerged from hiero- 
glyphics and pictographs there was advance in the great 
art by which knowledge was accumulated, and the expe- 
riences of the boldest, and the thoughts of the wisest, 
were placed at the service of their brethren far distant in 
both place and time. 

The later steps of the development of language have 
been in its graphic forms and are plainly within the purview 
of the student; because they directly illustrate permuta- 

^ P'irst, Fourth, and Tenth Annual Reports, United States Bureau of Eth- 
nology, Washington. 



374 LANGUAGE 

tion they give a new warrant to the arguments of this book. 
The new birth of knowledge, the revival of the spirit of 

inquiry unhampered by tradition, which 
The Leap due to Printing, commenced in Europe four centuries ago, 

has been largely indebted to the art of 
printing, to the re-invention of movable types by Gutenberg 
of Mainzc Isaac Taylor, in The Alphabet^ Vol. II, p. 182, 
says: 

In the fourteenth century engraved wooden blocks were used 
to print playing-cards and sacred pictures. The next step was to 
engrave a few words below the picture, as in the case of St. Chris- 
topher, with two lines of legend, dated in 1423. The revolution 
effected by Gutenberg consisted not so much in the printing- 
press as in his subsequent invention of movable types, which were 
first cut in intagho, and then cast \\\ metal from the wooden ma- 
trix. Without these types his enterprise of printing the great folio 
Bible, completed in 1455, would have been impracticable. Mova- 
ble types, however, have been repeatedly invented. They were 
probably used for Babylonian and Assyrian seals, and were un- 
doubtedly employed long before the Christian era by the potters 
of Thasos, as is proved by the occasional inversion of potters' 
marks. They were again invented in China in the tenth century 
A. D., and were also used about the same time for stamping the 
legends on the coins of Tibet, 

The essence of this great invention lay in having the 
types movable, so that each might be an element in that 
permutation of letters which we call a word. 

Long before the making of such types the same prin- 
ciple had been arrived at in the alphabet — certainly 
the most extraordinary and influential 
Origin of the Alphabet, achievement in the history of human 
expression. It appears to have been 
attained by a series of small adaptations, one after another, 
at the hands of men who did not foresee the surpassing 
importance of labours which, indeed, were more in the na- 
ture of unintended discovery than of deliberate contrivance. 
The alphabet took its rise in picture-writing. The picture 
of a thing stood for the thing, and when the picture was 



"M A 7 'I 



THE ALPHABET'S BEGINNING 375 

seen the name of the thing was pronounced. Thus the 
Egyptians represented '' mouth " by an outhne of a mouth. 
Whoever saw that outhne said "Rho," the Egyptian for 
mouth. But the sound "rho " could occur in the language 
with other meanings. The next step, then, was to indicate 
the sound "rho," whenever itwas intended to mean ''mouth," 
by the picture of a mouth, which was gradually in time 

conventionalised (Fig. 93). Finall}^ the 

vowel was disregarded, and a picture of a 
mouth came to represent R, as a sound and 
as a written letter, under any and all cir- 
cumstances. The sign which first had stood Fig. 93. 
for a thing, and then for the sound of its "^'" ^^°^ "Rho," 
name, was now completely detached from ,, mouth " with 
its original source and meaning, so as at Phoenician de- 
last to signify a sound simply and only. "^^^ forms. 
In this way the Egyptians worked out a complete alphabet 
in the modern sense, but they never applied it in its purity. 
They retained much of picturing in their writing, apparently 
unaware that picturing could with advantage be wholly 
superseded by a sign for each of the few sounds with 
which all the words of a full vocabulary may be formed. 
It is asserted, but so far unproved, that the Phoenicians 
perfected the alphabetical principle which they derived 
from the Egyptians. At last, by whomsoever accom- 
plished, the letters which formed the elements of names, 
or other words, became so simple that, few though they 
were, they sufficed to build the amplest speech. That lan- 
guage may be considered as jointed, that its joints are 
separable, and that, for all their fewness, they may yield 
permutations in myriads, is surely as pregnant a discovery 
as ever has fallen to the lot of man. In modern Eng- 
lish 26 letters produce no fewer than 250,000 words in 
an exhaustive dictionary which includes technical terms. 
The Chmese, with singular conservatism, have clung to 



376 LANGUAGE 

abbreviated pictures for each individual object or person, 
relation or idea, with the result that their written char- 
acters are nearly 50,000 in number. Incomparably better 
is the plan which constructs a word from its simplest com- 
ponent sounds, and gives each of these sounds a sign easily 
written or printed. Professor A. Melville Bell, in his 
Visible Speech and Vocal Physiology, and also in his 
World- English, has pointed out the shortcomings of 
the English alphabet, — its failures to match sounds with 
signs, — and proposed a complete series of symbols which 
would shorten by as much as a year the time needed for 
the mastery of the English tongue.^ The World-English 
alphabet consists of forty-four elements. The symbols of 
" visible speech " are adapted to the expression of the artic- 
ulate sounds in all languages, and thus proffer themselves 
as the foundation of a universal tongue. 

Taking the English alphabet as it stands, if every per- 
mutation of it were pronounceable and charged with mean- 
ing, 9 of its letters would be enough to 
Permutations Possible give US 362,880 words as against the 
and Actual. 250,000 to be Contained in the new Ox- 

ford Dictionary. If the whole 26 letters, 
from A to Z, were capable of like permutation, the product 
would be no fewer than 403,291,461, 126,605, 635, 584,000,- 
000 words. In the arrangements and rearrangements of 
the 10 Arabic numerals in mathematics, in the endless as- 
semblages possible to the '^'^ notes of an ordinary piano, 
there is a much wider play of permutation than in word- 
making. So, too, in the sphere of chemistry, its seventy 
or eighty elements may be combined to form substances 
all but infinite in their variety; and here we come upon 

1 These works are published by the Volta Bureau, Washington. Visible 
Speech is now employed in America in teaching six thousand deaf pupils. It 
is because of this particular use of the symbols in this country that their value 
in general education is less widely understood here than in Europe. 



SPEECH A SOCIAL BOND 377 

strange contrasts between the combining power of one 
element and the inertness of another. Carbon enters into 
so enormous a number of important compounds as to have 
a *' chemistry " to itself, while argon and helium seem to 
be entirely devoid of uniting power. However numerous 
the compounds created from the elements of the chemist, 
each bears a distinct name. The dictionary has many 
other terms than those of the chemical laboratory, and 
language far excels the permutations possible to the fol- 
lowers of Lavoisier, for words may, in turn, be united to 
form statements numberless. The infinity of observation 
and experience, of interpretative and imaginative power, 
may all be told as words flow into the sentences of the ex- 
plorer and worker, the thinker and poet. 

Speech has incidentally done man a service so inestima- 
ble as to demand a closing word. As we endeavour to 
recall the successive developments of 
language, and observe how names once the so^^ruser. 
as clearly recognisable as the ** meeow " 
which a child confers upon a cat have become slurred by 
laziness, or combined with sounds purely interjectional in 
origin, we catch a glimpse of the highest office borne by 
speech in the making of man. If a tribe, having arrived at 
a somewhat full vocabulary, was to continue to enjoy its 
use, that tribe had to stick together; otherwise words 
would soon lose their significance. By as much as a lan- 
guage contains terms whose meaning must be learned 
afresh by every individual, by just so much has that lan- 
guage put a premium upon social ties, upon the capacity 
and the will to live together, to co-operate in defence or 
attack. It is only very early in the human day that we 
can allowably imagine, as at the beginning of this chapter, 
a wanderer going forth by himself in search of food. In 
an era far remote in his history man must have found 
comfort, cheer, and safety in the bonds of what, in the 



378 LANGUAGE 

germ, was society. In thus binding men together, in re- 
placing war by peace, in making it gainful as well as right 
to prefer union to conflict, language has borne a part not 
second to that of any other faculty of man. He stands 
the highest of beings not only because of his range of men- 
tal power, but because of his sympathy, in so far as he 
finds his chief happiness in promoting others' weal. Lan- 
guage, which first made human society, is to-day remaking 
it with closer ties and firmer bonds now that speech is 
electric and voice answers voice with half a continent be- 
tween. 



CHAPTER XXVI 

THE ANCESTRY OF MAN IN THE LIGHT OF NINETEENTH- 
CENTURY ADVANCES 

LANGUAGE, the theme of the preceding chapter, 
J may well continue to occupy our attention. Let us 
listen for a moment to the click of a telegraph instrument, 
that we may hear another message than 

that committed to its wire. A New New Departures. 

York merchant, his words reduced to 
mere dots, dashes, and spaces, is sending an order to his 
partner in Hong Kong. Within the hour he may receive 
intelligence borne to Sandy Hook from a steamer whose 
Marconi apparatus asks only ether as the carrier of its 
pulses. Next he may converse with a correspondent in 
the metropolis of Louisiana, every tone and cadence of his 
voice clearl}^ transmitted for well-nigh nineteen hundred 
miles. This impressing electricity for verbal communica- 
tion is a radical departure from all previous methods. It 
is not as if light of redoubled intensity, a mirror of sharper 
focus, or a rocket of bolder flight had given a new breadth 
to old plans of signalling. The feats of electric telegraphy 
and telephony stand in a category by themselves, distinctly 
separated from that in which light was the ministrant, and 
this new category is one of vastly wider scope than the 
old. What is true of electricity as a conveyer of words is 
equally true of electricity as a new force within the grasp 
of man for manifold other services. 

379 



380 LIGHT ON HUMAN EVOLUTION 

A photograph has much the same significance as the tele- 
gram which a httle while ago we overheard as it sped from 
New York to Hong Kong. An amateur hands us what on 
the surface is a picture of Brooklyn Bridge, beneath the sur- 
face much more appears. Six minutes ago he snapped his 
kodak at the great structure, and in the brief interval he has 
developed his negative, printed and fixed a clear and beau- 
tiful positive. To outline the bridge with a pencil in this 
minute and accurate fashion is utterly beyond our ama- 
teur's powers, and might severely tax the skill of a highly 
accomplished draughtsman. At first the camera, as devised 
in Italy, was employed that the pencil or the brush might 
seize the lines and hues of its images. Pencil and brush 
were cast aside when means were found of making light im- 
print with accuracy and permanence every detail of a cam- 
era's image. In photography, as in telegraphy, progress 
has lain not in improving an old method, but in supplanting 
it by a process absolutely different, and in many directions 
of incomparably broader range. 

In the preceding pages there has been a brief recital of 
the steps by which the mastery of fire led at last to the 
subjugation of electricity, and depiction for the first time in 
its course took a new direction by the capture of images 
in the camera. While the path in each case from the old 
plane to the new was unmarked by aught in the least re- 
sembling a revolution, there was certainly a revolution of 
consequences most profound when once electricity and the 
photographic beam had become the docile servants of man. 
These facts are typical : progress has leaps, as radically new 
powers fall under human control, and history divides itself 
into chapters, each distinguished from its predecessors by 
the arrival of man at a new resource of prime dignity. And 
these resources do not enter the field of effort as additions 
merely, but with all the effect of multipliers, as, in the cases 



THE ELECTRIC LEAP IN SPEECH 381 

of fire, electricity, and the photographic ray, we have re- 
marked somewhat in detail. 

As we traced the work of the forerunners who smoothed 
the path for the electrician, long before electricity as a 
distinct force was recognised at all, we 
saw that, however long and circuitous The Latest steps 
the road which stretches from old powers ^"p^^^" '^^ ^''^'^ 
to new, the act of touching the goal-post 
is sudden enough. All that is needed is the exceptional 
intelHgence of a Franklin, a Volta, a Henry„ And thus 
the latest achievements of man light up those of the earliest 
days in which he deserved to be called human. Two 
years ago there was discovered on Southampton Island, in 
Hudson's Bay, a small tribe of Eskimos so primitive in cul- 
ture as to be destitute of metals. These men doubtless 
could speak to each other no more readily, no farther 
apart, than did their great-grandfathers at the close of the 
eighteenth century. The leap in verbal communication 
which has taken place in the past sixty years makes it easy 
to comprehend how the first leap in language occurred on 
one memorable day long ago. It was not more difficult 
for a progenitor of these Eskimos to mean *' bear " by a 
bearish growl than for Professor Bell to convert the word 
''bear" into electric waves from which the sound may be 
recovered after a journey half-way across the United 
States. And the instant that in ancient times a sign or a 
sound could symbolise and recall anything beyond sight 
or hearing, a new era dawned for the human soul. The 
distinction that lifts man incomparably above the creatures 
next to him is not a matter of muscle, nerve, or skull capa- 
city so much as the intelligence vitally dependent upon 
those powers of expression and of record which, to repeat 
a thought of Pascal, make mankind as one man, ever living 
and always learning. Throughout the pages of this book 



382 LIGHT ON HUMAN EVOLUTION 

there has been constant reference to the principle of per- 
mutation, formally set forth on page 3. As our argument 
draws to a close it may be fairly said that there is much to 
support the view that the supreme acquisitions of man, as 
they have one by one fallen into his hands, have the dis- 
tinctness one from another of the successive factors In a 
permutative series, and enter the field of human progress 
with a similar multiplying effect. 

Our figures on page 3 indicate something further. We 
have seen that each distinctively human resource has 
given rise to still others, which spring 
Accelerations. from It as flower from seed ; and we 
have observed how powers old and new 
combine to yield fruits unimaginable before their union. 
Professor Rontgen's discovery of the X ray was the out- 
come of uniting the utmost expedients of both electricity 
and photography. In a parallel Indebtedness a telegraphic 
pulse too feeble to actuate a pencil or a pen, however nice 
of poise, may register itself upon a sensitive film. The 
architecture of science has something in common with the 
rearing of an arch. Hour by hour the voussoirs rise from 
the ground ; at last comes the supreme moment when the 
keystone is dropped into place, and now that each half of 
the structure finds its complement in the other, both dis- 
play a strength wholly new. 

When once a trench was dug between the stock now 
human and its next of kin, either by superior prehension, 
quicker sight, or a voice readier of modulation, that trench 
soon grew to a gulf by swift increase of the particular fac- 
ulty most effective in hfting man above the simple animal. 
And not only was the capital of human intelligence thus 
increased, but so likewise was the rate of interest at which 
that capital was gainful. With the growth of intelli- 
gence due to the mastery of fire, its kindler came at length 
to the creation of that subtiler fire, electricity, rich with 



WHY LINKS ARE MISSING 383 

gifts, a few of which have been noticed in these pages. 
The nineteenth century in its seizure of new resources of 
prime dignity, in its ingenious development of the vital rela- 
tions between each and every other, has expanded the 
realm of science more than all preceding time. The rapid 
augmentation of effect as one multiplier succeeds another 
in the permutative series on page 3 would seem to outline 
the growth of human mastership with distinct verity. Not 
only is the pace of evolution at decisive epochs quickened 
to a leap, but these leaps may take place at intervals 
ever shorter as intelligence grows keener, more alive to its 
opportunities ; while the effects of these leaps, as new re- 
sources interact one with another, has the result of con- 
stantly accelerating the upward march of man. And hence 
the total period occupied in human evolution may have 
been much shorter than is commonly supposed. 

The accelerations of human progress afford us an ex- 
planation of the gaps which divide man from anthropoid — 
gaps which have caused many students 
of evolution to hesitate in accepting the ^ ^^ ^^^ q^^_ 
Darwinian theory of human descent.^ eaiogicai Tree. 
Let us for a moment observe the latest 
strides of mankind, and they may inform us as to the char- 
acteristics of his earliest upward steps. We have seen in 
our brief survey of certain fields of science that discoverers 
and inventors are busy, not at a mine of great but definite 
riches, but rather at the extension of a sphere which touches 
an ever larger surface of the unknown and explorable, the 
unattempted and feasible. All this is illuminated by the 
permutative principle to which, as a guiding thought, we 

1 Within recent years there has been much discussion by evolutionists of 
the inheritance of acquired characters. It would seem that evidence in point 
is adducible in the lengthened fingers and shortened toes of modern man ; they 
clearly indicate that the effects of use and disuse are cumulative as one genera- 
tion succeeds another. 



384 LIGHT ON HUMAN EVOLUTION 

have constantly referred. If we turn to page 3 once more, 
we shall remark that 5 factors yield 120 permutations, 96 
more than the product (24) of 4 factors ; while the product 
(24) of 4 factors exceeds that of 3 factors (6) by only 18. 
The difference between one product and the next increases 
enormously as a new factor enters — with its broadened 
play of interlacement. The progress of mankind as suc- 
cessively indebted to the upright attitude, the mastery of 
fire, articulate speech, writing, and the conquest of electri- 
city, cannot be represented by so simple a piece of arith- 
metic as this, yet it may be justly said that there is an 
indication of truth in its rapidly expanding divergence of 
eflFect as a new factor comes into the account. We have 
already noted with somewhat of particularity that fire itself 
has not broadened the horizon of the worker, the explorer, 
and the thinker as much as the capture of electricity ; and 
electricity has come into harness too recently for its capa- 
bilities to be as yet fully discernedo 

One of the suggestions which led Darwin to the discov- 
ery of the law of natural selection arose from the rule 
formulated by Malthus — that organic beings tend to mul- 
tiply in geometrical progression. That rule, however 
much masked and modified in the complexity of actual 
life, nevertheless remains potent enough to explain the un- 
relenting struggle for existence which Darwin has so 
graphically pictured in every field of natural history. It 
is in that struggle that favourable variations find their 
opportunity to survive and to propagate, with the issue of 
types of life better adapted to surroundings ever changing, 
to surroundings ever growing in the main more diversi- 
fied. Of similar elucidating value are the figures in a 
permutative chain as they succeed each other, and they 
supplement the suggestion of Malthus in a telling way. 
When through the brain of a primitive Edison the idea 
flashes that fire, which he has unwittingly kindled, may be 



PERMUTATION EXPLAINS MUCH 385 

intentionally kindled again by the clash of flint, or the 
friction of sticks, his exceptional wit means an instant and 
tremendous impulse forward, first for himself, next for his 
tribe and his race. And this act of genius has a decisive 
result in competitions which mean either life or death. 

Let us imagine two modern navies equal in every respect 
except that one has the electric telegraph and that the 
other has not. Which, in battle, will win ? Just as con- 
clusive must have been the verdict when arms of bronze 
were opposed to weapons of stone, or other equal advan- 
tage came into the hands of one particular tribe or race, 
while their rivals missed the new factor of supremacy by 
however little. The warfare which in modern times has 
extirpated so many native races in America, Africa, and 
Australia, may have had its counterpart in the battles 
which may once have enabled the ancestors of these very 
savages to be victors in contests where they alone remained 
alive. Thus, for the third time, the principle of permuta- 
tion casts an illuminating ray upon the descent of man, by 
suggesting how it may have come about that here and there 
links are missing to connect him with his kindred, to make 
the adducible proofs of evolution as convincing with re- 
gard to man as they are with regard to other species, and 
to nature herself as a whole. 

To sum up in a final word the conclusions at which we 
have arrived: (i) The pace of progress is quickened to a 
leap as a distinctly new resource flowers from faculties long 
enjoyed. (2) Such a resource, when of prime dignity, en- 
ters the field of human capability with multiplying effect. 
(3) This results in an increasing width of gap between the 
highest and lowest human races as evolution takes its 
course ; and effects a severance, all but infinite, betwixt 
man and the primates who now stand next beneath him in 
the tree of life. 



APPENDIX 

THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE 

THE nineteenth century offers us one contrast with its prede- 
cessors more conspicuous and significant than any other. 
While its feats of science far outdistance those 
The Supremacy of of any preceding era, and, indeed, in many 
Science. directions exceed the sum total of previous 

human accomplishment, its additions to great 
literature, to the masterpieces of fine art, are not striking, either in 
quality or compass. The artist and the man of letters are perforce 
disposed to marvel at the remoteness of the day when sculpture, 
architecture, and poetry reached their culmination in Greece and 
Palestine. To come to supremacies less remote — Dante and 
Shakespeare, Titian, Raphael, and Valasquez remain unap- 
proached. But in the realm of science, of ordered knowledge, 
we face to-day the east and not the west, and here the horizon 
ever retreats as the explorer advances, ever widens the higher he 
climbs. The distinction, worthy of all emphasis, has been drawn 
by Sir William Roberts : 

The evolution of science differs fundamentally from that of literature and the 
fine arts. Science advances by a succession of discoveries. Each discovery 
constitutes a permanent addition to natural knowledge, and furnishes a point 
of vantage for, and a suggestion to, further discoveries. This mode of ad- 
vance has no assignable limits ; for the phenomena of nature — the materials 
upon which science works — are practically infinite in extent and complexity. 
Moreover, science creates while it investigates ; it creates new chemical com- 
pounds, new combinations of forces, new conditions of substances, and 
strange, new environments — such as do not exist at all on the earth's surface 
in primitive nature. These " new natures," as Bacon would have called 
them, open out endless vistas of lines of future research. The prospects of 
the scientific inquirer are therefore bounded by no horizon ; and no man can 
tell, nor even in the least conjecture, what ultimate issues he may reach. . . . 

386 



THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE 387 

The difference here indicated between the growth of art and literature is, of 
course, inherent in the subjects, and is not difficult to explain. The creation 
of an artist, whether in art or literature, is the expression and the embodiment 
of the artist's own mind, and remains always, in some mystic fashion, part 
and parcel of his personality. But a scientific discovery stands detached, and 
has only an historical relation to the investigator. The work of an artist is 
mainly subjective ; the work of a scientific inquirer is mainly objective. When 
and after a branch of art has reached its period of maturity, the pupil of a 
master in that art cannot start where his master ended, and make advances 
upon his work ; he is fortunate if at the end of his career he can reach his 
master's level. But the pupil of a scientific discoverer starts where his master 
left off, and, even though of inferior capacity, can build upon his foundations 
and pass beyond him. It would seem as if no real advance in art and litera- 
ture were possible except on the assumption that there shall occur an enlarge- 
ment of the artistic and literary faculty of the human mind. No such 
assumption is required to explain and render possible the continuous advance 
of science. The discoverer of to-day need not be more highly endowed than 
the discoverer of a hundred years ago ; but he is able to reach farther and 
higher because he stands on a more advanced and elevated platform built up 
by his predecessors.! 

Above and beyond any particular gift of science, — a new 
chemical element, a ray of new penetration, or even a new rule 

of physical and chemical action, — there has 
"^^MethoT^*^ ^^^" evolved something more and greater: 

nothing else than perfecting the instrument 
by which discovery carves its path and particular rules are merged 
into universal law — the scientific method, now confessed the one 
trustworthy means for the winning of all truth. Beginning in the 
comparatively simple sphere of natural science, it has passed to 
the more difficult fields of art, history, and criticism, to reforms 
social and political, moral and rehgious. In all its work, whether 
it has to do with the mere machinery of the livelihoods, or with 
the things of the mind and heart, the conscience and the will, it 
means reahty, accuracy, fidelity to the directly observed and care- 
fully comprehended fact. It disregards traditions, legends, and 
guesses, however closely associated with great names or hoary 
institutions. In their stead it is erecting a new authority, which 
finds its sanctions in knowledge, in observation, experiment, rea- 
soning, in untiring, impartial verification. When it gives play to 
the imagination and offers a conjecture in the hope that it may 
be helpful, the conjecture is plainly labelled as such, and is with- 

1 Harveian oration, delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, Lon- 
don, October i8, 1897. Nature, October 28, 1897. 



388 APPENDIX 

drawn the moment that a sound objection so demands. The man 
of science ever rejoices when he finds, as he often can, that men 
of old had a forefeehng of modern scientific truth ; but under all 
circumstances he fully declares exactly what he discovers, how- 
ever much his disclosures may cause a valued heritage to be 
disprized. Triumphs to us inconceivable doubtless await the 
centuries to come, but there will remain as the inalienable glory 
of the nineteenth that to the old question. What is truth? it first 
gave, not the old answer, Whatever has been so considered, but 
Whatsoever can be proved. 



INDEX 



Abney, W. de W., photographic inves- 
tigator, 304, 305 ; photographs ultra- 
red rays, 339. 

Aborigines, photographs of, 300, 301. 

Absolute zero, 72. 

Abstract terms, 369. 

Accelerations of progress, 6, 382. 

Acetylene, 115. 

Acheson, E. G., carborundum, 114; 
graphite, 115. 

Acker process caustic soda, 118. 

Adjectives, 369. 

Adulteration detected by polarised light, 
303. 

^olipile, Hero's, 29, 49, 52. 

Agamemno7i, British navy, cable-layer, 
197. 

Agave palmeri, 36. 

Agriculture, departments of, photo- 
graphs, 295. 

Ainos as fire-kindlers, 17. 

Air liquefied, 72. 

Alarms, automatic electric, 174. 

Alchemy, hopes of, 13. 

Algol, star, photographed, 337. 

Alloys, 36, 42, 76; electroplated as' 
such, 140. 

Almeida, d', Jose, gutta-percha, 194. 

Alphabet, origin of, 375 ; telegraphic, 
183. 

Aluminium, produced electrically, 117. 

Amateur, scope for photographic, 304, 
305; debt of photography to, 305. 

Ammonia as refrigerant, 65. 

Amoeba, 272. 

Ampere's observations, 180. 

Ancestry of man (Chapter XXVI), 379. 

Andamanese, fire of, 13. 

Anderson, Domenico, photographer, 
284. 

Anomalies, 76 ; of heat, 76. 

Anthropology, photography aids, 300, 
301. 

Apaches expert fire-kindlers, 17. 

Appendix, Golden Age of Science, 386. 

Arabic notation, 371. 

Archaeology, photography aids, 298. 

Archer overcome, 38. 



Archer, Scott, uses collodion films, 291. 
Architect, photography aids, 298, 302. 
Architecture, influenced by fire, 25: of 

science, 382. 
Arctic photographs, 302, 
Argon, 75 ; inertness, 377. 
Arizonan miner's photographs, 304. 
Armstrong, S. T., gutta-percha, 194. 
Arrow aflame, 31. 
Art, fine, and photography, 307; aid 

to study, 284. 
Art of American Indians, 301. 
Assiniboines cooking, 26. 
Asteroids discovered by photography, 

328. 
Astronomy, orthochromatic plates in, 

284 ; photography and, 325. 
Atlantic cables, 196. 
Atom paints its portrait, 347. 
Attitude, upright, 2, 11. 
Auroral light, 130. 
Australia, earthquake in, 359. 
Autographs transmitted electrically, 171, 
Automatic appliances, electric, 174. 
Aztec priests, mirror, 46. 

Babcock & Wilcox boiler, 59. 

Bacteriology, photography aids, 299. 

Baldwin, locomotive, 55, plate facing 
57- 

Ball-bearings, 43. 

Balloon photography, 298 ; in war, 
358. 

Balmain's luminous paint, 349. 

Barnard, E. E., on planetary photog- 
raphy, 325 ; on astronomical photog- 
raphy instead of drawings, 326, 327; 
on guiding clock, 327 ; discovers comet 
photographically, 329. 

Batteries, electric (Chapter XI), 135. 

Bavispe earthquake, 10 

Becquerel, A. E., phosphorescence, 348, 

355- 
Bell, Alexander Graham, telephone, 229; 

photophone, 243. 
Bell, Alexander Melville, incitement to 

son's researches, 229 ; lip-reading, 369; 

Visible Speech and Vocal Physiology, 



389 



39° 



INDEX 



376; visible speech, 376; World-Eng- 
lish, 376. 

Bell, Louis, Electric Railway, 162. 

Benjamin, Park, Intellectual Rise in Elec- 
tricity, 96. 

Bennett, Charles, improves gelatin emul- 
sion, 292. 

Berenson, Bernhard, on photography of 
paintings, 284. 

Bernardos arc process, 113. 

Beta Aurigse, 336, plate facing 337. 

Betelguex, star, 334. 

Bickmore, A. S., series lectures, 278. 

Bird toy, 314. 

Birds, pedigree of, 22. 

Blake telephone transmitter, 231. 

Blast-furnace gases, 63. 

Bleek, W., Origin of Language, 370 ; 
benefits of language, 370. 

Blowers, 61. 

Blowpipe, electric, 117. 

Bodleian Library photographs books, 
310. 

Boiler, steam, Babcock & Wilcox, 52. 

Boissonas, F., photograph Mont Blanc, 
297. 

Bolometer, 347, spectrum facing 347. 

Bond, G. P., photographs moon, 325 ; 
photographs nebula, 341. 

Boomerang flight photographed, 318. 

Botanist as photographer, 294, 295. 

Bowditch, H. P., composite photog- 
raphy, 319. 

Branly, E., coherer, 219. 

Bridges, Mr., photo-theodolites, 296. 

Bright, Charles, Submarine Telegraphs, 
205. 

Brinton, D. G., on sun-worshippers, 89. 

Bronze, 36-39. 

Brush, C. F., arc-lighting, 122. 

Buckingham, C. L., on diplex teleg- 
raphy, 208 ; Electricity in Daily Life, 
208. 

Budapest telephonic news service, 238. 

Bunsen, spectroscopy, 332. 

Burne-Jones, Sir E., photographed, 

307- 
Burning-glass, 46. 
Butterfly {frontispiece), 288. 

Cable, Atlantic, 196-206; aids to re- 
search, 253. 

Cable, Commercial, Co/s cable, 201. 

Cable telegraphy (Chapter XIV), 193; 
message photographed, 359. 

Cailletet, M., balloon photography, 298; 
liquefaction gases, 69. 

Calcium carbide, 115, 

Camera, imitates eye, 272 ; improved, 
277. 

Canadian National Park map, 297. 

Canal, Erie, electric traction, 166. 

Canes Venatici, nebula in, 342, plate 
facing 342. 

Carbon button, for telephone, 232; oxi- 
dation of, for production electricity. 



251 ; sensitive to light, 245 ; photo- 
graphic process, 323. 

Carbons, lamp, prices, 168. 

Carborundum, 114, 115. 

Carib of Guiana, 301. 

CarUn, W. E., photograph pika, 299, 

Carmelite Hospice, 119. 

Carnegie Steel Co.'s electric motors, 159. 

Carrier pigeons bear microphotographs, 
280. 

Caustic soda, 118. 

Cautery, electric, iii. 

Cedergren, H. T., on Swedish tele- 
phone system, 241. 

Census tabulator, Hollerith, 170. 

Chappe telegraph, 178. 

Charioteer, constellation, 336. 

Chemistry, dawn of, 12 ; combinations 
of, 376 ; inertness, 377. 

Chill due to expansion of gases, 70. 

Chimneys, tall, superseded, 60. 

Chinese characters, 375 ; flying kites, 
314; use telephone, 239, facing 239. 

Christmas, 90. 

Clark, Latimer, experiment with ocean 
cables, 205. 

Clarke, F. W., on chemical elements, 
88 ; Coftstants of Nature, 126. 

Clay tablets, 28. 

Cleveland, electric traction, 164. 

Coherer, 219. 

Cold, commercial value of, 6j. 

Cole, R. S., Treatise on Photographic 
Optics, 276. 

Cole, Timothy, engravings, 309. 

Colour, photographically translated into 
black and white, 281 ; photography, 
285. 

Colour-screen, 283. 

Colours, what they tell, 331. 

Combinations facilitated by telegraphy, 
190, 191. 

Comenius illustrated books, 309. 

Comets photographed, 329, 330, plate 
facing 330. 

Commercial cable, 201. 

Common's photograph moon, 329. 

Communication perfected by electricity, 
248, 260. 

Composite photography, 318, plate 
facing 319 ; in stellar spectroscopy, 
336. 

Concord grape, 22. 

Condenser for ocean cables, 204. 

Constructive arts, photography aids, 
302. 

Contact unnecessary for electric actua- 
tion, 173. 

Cooking, 10, 26. 

Copper, discovered, 35 ; hard drawn, in 
telegraphy, 187 ; metallurgy, 44 ; re- 
fined electrolytically, 139 ; smelting, 
36. 

Copying by photography, 270. 

Cornell, Ezra, uses poles for telegraph 
and glass insulators, 186, 



INDEX 



391 



Corona photographed, 326. 

Coroniuni, 339. 

Cosmogonies outworn, 92. 

Costs reduced with widened market, 167. 

Craig, James, " Relation of Photog- 
raphy to Art," 307. 

Cro-Magnon skull, 371. 

Crooke foil, 136. 

Crookes, Sir William, discovers victo- 
rium, 339 ; radiometer, 349 ; bulb, 
349, 352. 

Crosby, Oscar T., Electric Railway, 
162; " man-hours " saved, 258. 

Cross-fertilisation of the sciences, 74. 

Crowninshield, F., on art and photog- 
raphy, 307. 

Curie, M. and Mme., discover radio- 
active substances, 355. 

Cuvier's catastrophes, 20. 

Daguerre, photographic inventor, 274; 

portrait, facing 276. 
Daguerreotypes copied in plating bath, 

321- 
Dallmeyer, T. R., telephotography, 

297. 
D'Almeida, Jose, gutta-percha, 194. 
Damaras, fire of, 13. 
Daniell cell, 180. 
Darwin, Charles, photographed, 307 ; 

debt to Malthus, 384. 
Darwin, G. H., on meteoric swarm, 343. 
Darwinism, 4. 

Davison, George, landscapes, 307. 
Davy, Humphry, produces arc light, 

121 ; decomposed potash and* soda, 

141. 
Dawkins, W. B., on bronze axe, 38. 
Deaf-mutes, photography aids, 317, 
Decombe, L., photographs Hertz waves, 

293- 

Deer photographed at night, facing 299. 

Delany, rapid telegraph, 169; multiplex 
telegraph, 207; synchronous tele- 
graph, 214. 

Derrick, electric, 159. 

Designer, photography aids, 306. 

Deslandres investigated bridge strains, 

315- 

Development, photographic, 274; gallic 
acid, 290 ; an aid to quickness of im- 
pression, 293. 

Deville, E., photographic surveying, 
297. 

Dewar, James, experiments, 69, 75; va- 
cuous bulb, 74 ; flask, 78. 

Dexterity and mastery fire, 23. 

Diamond, combustible, 85 ; artificial, 
116. 

Dimensions of photograph easily va- 
ried, 278. 

Diplomacy affected by telegraph, 256. 

Dissipation of energy, 86, 87. 

Distillation, fractional, 75. 

Division of labor, photographic, 275. 

Dogs, voices of, 366. 



Domestic uses of electricity, 249. 
Domestication of animals, 48 ; N. S. 

Shaler on, 366. 
Doolittle, T. B., suggests hard drawn 

copper wire, 187. 
Doppler, C, study of waves, 333. 
Dordogne cave carvings, 264. 
Douglas, James, on copper metallurgy, 

44 ; modern locomotion, 57. 
Dover-Calais cable, 195. 
Doyen, kinetographs in surgery, 318. 
Draper, Henry, stellar spectra, 335 ; 

memorial, 335 ; photographs nebula, 

341- 
Draper, J. W., takes first photographic 

portrait, 290; photographs moon, 325. 
Draper, Miss D. C, first photographic 

portrait, 290. 
Draught, mechanical, 61. 
Drawing and photography, 306. 
Drill, fire, 17, 19. 
Dubois, E., discovers skull, 372, 
Duplex telegraphy, 210. 
Diirer's works in stereopticon, 279 ; Lit- 
tle Passion, 279. 
Dyes, fugitive, useful, 282; orthochro- 

matic, 283. 
Dynamo, first, 107; prices, 167. 

Earthquake, causes fire, 10; recorded, 

359- 

Easter, 90. 

Easter Islanders, 301. 

Edison , incandescent filaments, 124, 128 ; 
new lamp, 128 ; portrait, facing 213 ; 
quadruplex telegraph, 213; inductive 
telegraphy, 216 ; telephone, 229 ; tele- 
phone transmitter, 231 ; megaphone, 
235 ; kinetograph, kinetoscope, 316. 

Efflorescence is rapid, 5. 

Egyptian alphabet, 375. 

Eickemeyer, R., photographed, 307. 

Electric arc, first, 121 ; in metal-work- 
ing, 113. 

Electric batteries (Chapter XI), 135. 

Electric blowpipe, 117. 

Electric casting in vacuo, 117. 

Electric forge, 114. 

Electric furnace, 114, 115. 

Electric heat (Chapter IX), no; for 
warming and cooking, 118, 119. 

Electric induction, 106. 

Electric light (Chapter X), 121; goes 
where no other light can, 133 ; safety, 
133 ; theatrical uses, 133 ; wholesome- 
ness, 133 ; advantages, 134 ; in photo- 
micrography, 281. 

Electric lines of force, 104, 105. 

Electric railroads, 161 ; benefits, 257. 

Electric search-light, 132. 

Electricity, conduction, 254; converti- 
bility of, 256 ; energy in its best phase, 
247; in the service of mechanic and 
engineer (Chapter XII), 153 ; in trans- 
mission motive power, 153-156; joined 
to heat, 117; mastery of, i; most de- 



392 



INDEX 



sirable form of energy, 174; municipal, 
258; not an infant, 256; and photog- 
raphy as allies (Chapter XXIV), 346, 
358; production (Chapter VIII), 94; 
relations with heat, 7, 102 ; relations 
with magnetism, 103; review and 
prospect (Chapter XVIII), 247; velo- 
city in ocean cables, 202. 

Electro-duplication medals, etc., 137, 
138. 

Electrolysis, 141; of water, 145, 

Electromagnet, 209 ; double wound, 210, 

Electromobile, 148. 

Electroplating, 136, 137. 

Electrotypy, 138. 

Elements, evolution, 88. 

Elkin, W. L., photographed meteors, 

3"- 
Elmendorf, D. L., telephotography, 298. 
Engineering, photography aids, 302. 
English dictionary, extent of, 375. 
Engraver, photography aids, 308, 358. 
Engraving colour values, 281. 
Erie Canal, electric traction, 166. 
Eros, asteroid, 329, 331. 
Eskimo lamp, 12 ; Southampton Island, 

381. 
Ether of space, 80. 
Ethnology, U. S. Bureau of, Reports, 

373- 

Evaporation, chill of, 65. 

Evolution, human, 4; chemical ele- 
ments, 88; astronomical, 344. 

Expression in photography, 320. 

Eye imitated by camera, 272. 

Factory system, 259. 

Fahie, J. ]., History Wireless Telegraph, 
220. 

Faraday, liquefied gases, 68 ; discovered 
induction, 106 ; magneto machine, 107, 
plate facing 107; portrait, facing 105. 

Faraday, cable-ship, 202. 

Fargis, Rev. G. A., recorder, 360. 

Field, Cyrus W., Atlantic cable, 196- 
201. 

Field, Henry M., History Atlantic Tele- 
graph, 199. 

Fire, adding fuel to, 11 ; and electricity, 
relations, 7; and religion, 25, 89; as 
ignited in nature, 10; as lure, 30; 
benefits, 91 ; drill, 17, 19 ; early les- 
sons of, 12; effect on soil of, 12; first 
uses of, 24; higher teachings of 
(Chapter VII), 79 ; in signalling, 33 ; 
kindling, 2, 15; by ploughing, 18; 
by sawing, 18 ; mastery of, i, 9; mod- 
ern dependence on, 8, 9; passive en- 
joyment of, 10; preserving, 13; sup- 
planted by electricity, 120, 261. 

Fire-fly, Cuban, 131. 

Fires caused by matches, 133. 

Fixation, photographic, 270. 

Flame and its first uses (Chapter II), 8 ; 
first gains from (Chapter III), 24; 
supplanted by electric heat, 120. 



Flammarion, photography moon, 317. 

Flashing a filament, 125. 

Fleming, Mrs. W. P., discoveries by, 

337. 
Flexibility of electric mechanism, 173, 
Flight, problem of, 314. 
Flint kindles fire, 15, 262. 
Flint-makers, Brandon, 20. 
Flowering is rapid, 5. 
Fluorescence, 348. 
Force, persistence of, 250. 
Forestry, photography aids, 302. 
Forests of U. S. photographed, 295. 
Forge, electric, 114. 
Forgery detected by photography, 310. 
Form, photographic truth of (Chapter 

XX), 276. 
Foundry rivalled by electro-deposition, 

137- 
Fox-Talbot, photographic inventor, 275; 

first uses paper for negatives, 290; 

photogravure, 322. 
Franklin experiments, 94, 95. 
Frick refrigerator, 66. 
Friction absent from molecular motion, 

255- 
Fuel economy, 60; in metallurgy, 44. 
Fuel-gas, 62. 

Fuels, various, values, 10, 11, 14. 
Furnace, electric, 114, 115 ; control for, 

174. 
Fuse, electric, no, in. 

Gallic acid in development, 290. 
Galton, F., composite photography, 318 ; 

of horses and cattle, 321 ; expression 

in photography, 320. 
Galvani experiment, 100. 
Galvanised iron, 136. 
Galvanometer invented, 181 ; reflecting, 

205; Lord Kelvin's, 253. 
Gamma Leonis, 335. 
Gaps between man and animals, 6, 37, 

382, 383. 
Gas-engine, 61 ; produces electric light, 

122. 
Gases, kinetic theory, 84; liquefaction 

of, 68, 69, 70. 
Geissler tubes, 129. 

Gelatin dry plate invented, 292 ; advan- 
tages, 293, 294; bichromated, 322. 
Geographer as photographer, 295. 
Geologist as photographer, 295, 297. 
Geometry of dimensions, 60. 
Gesture at inception language. 365, 367. 
Gibraltar, ridge, Africa to, 20. 
Gilbert, William, 95, 
Gill, D., photographs comet and stars, 

330- 
Glaisher, James, balloon ascents, 298. 
Glass an electric non-conductor, 187. 
Glass-making, 30; by electric heat, 113. 
Glass, Louis, on Chinese use telephone, 

239- 
Glow-worm, 131. 
"Go," 365. 



INDEX 



393 



Goddard, J. F., shortens time in pho- 
tography, 291. 

Gold, 40; recovered electrolytically, 
140. 

Gold King Mine transmission, 155. 

Goquet's theory of origin pottery, 28. 

Gramme machine, 107. 

Graphite, 115. 

Gravitation, mystery of, 255. 

Gray, Elisha, harmonic telegraph, 172; 
telephone, 229. 

Gray, Stephen, 98. 

Great Eastern, cable-layer, 199, 200, 

Grimm, Hermann, revelations stereop- 
ticon, 278. 

Guericke, Otto von, 96. 

Gum bichromate process, 323. 

Gutenberg monument, 139 ; movable 
types, 374. 

Gutta-percha, 194. 

Gyroscope, lessons of, 314. 

Haeckel, E., on Pithecanthropus erectus, 

372 ; Last Link, 372. 
Hale, G. E., spectro-heliograph, 328. 
Hale, Horatio, origin languages, 372. 
Half-tone process, 323. 
Hamilton, A., Maori Art, 301. 
Hand useful in pointing, 365. 
Harvard Observatory photographs, 

331- 

Hawaii and wireless telegraph, 225. 

Heat, amode of motion, 82 ; Tyndall on, 
254; banishment of (Chapter VI), 64, 
248; electric (Chapter IX), no; con- 
stant temperatures, in; in metal- 
shaping, III ; mechanical equivalent 
of, 83. 

Heft, N. H., on third-rail system, 165. 

Heliograph, 178. 

Helium discovered, 339 ; inertness, 377. 

Helmholtz, analyses vowel sounds, 229 ; 
theory of colour, 285. 

Henry, electromagnet, 105; induction, 
216 ; observes penetration by electric 
waves, 356 ; telegraph, 181. 

Herbert, George, quotation, 344. 

Herschel, Sir John, fluorescence, 348. 

Herschel, Sir W,, compares skies to 
forest, 344. 

Hertz, experiments, 218 ; waves photo- 
graphed, 293; discovers transparency 
ofmetais, 349; visible light but one 
octave, 356. 

Hitchcock, Romeyn, on fire-drill, 19. 

Holland, W. J., Butterfly Book, 288. 

Hollerith census tabulator, 170. 

Hooke, Dr., telegraph, 177. 

Hopes, baseless, of electricity, 259, 

Hopgood, H. v.. Living Pictures, 317. 

Horn, bronze, 38. 

Horn-silver, 268. 

Hot blast, Neilson's, 43. 

Household, electricity in, 249. 

Houston, E. ]., Electric Street Railways , 
162. 



Huggins, Sir William, on motion in 

line of sight, 334 ; stellar spectra, 335 ; 

nebular evolution, 340. 
Hughes, D. E., microphone, wireless 

telegraph, 220; telephone transmitter, 

231. 
Huxley on Neanderthal skull, 372. 
Hydrogen spectrum, 332, 
Hyndman, H. H. F., Radiation, 356. 

Ice, 64. 

lies, George, Class in Geometry, 60. 

Illustrator, photography aids, 306. 

Inclosed arc-lamps, 131. 

Income, average American, 92. 

Indian picture, 266 ; pictographs, 373. 

Induction in ocean cable, 203 ; useful in 

telegraphy, 215, 216. 
Ingersoll, Ernest, on fire as lure, 31. 
Inheritance acquired characters, 383. 
Initiation broadened, 169; growth of, 

63 ; photographic, 267. 
Ink, secret, 274. 
Insect fertilisation, 21. 
Instantaneity, electric, made useful, 171. 
Instantaneous photography, 313. 
Insulation, telegraphic, 182, 186. 
Intelligence quickened, 46 ; duplicated 

in electric mechanism, 175. 
Interference waves, 80. 
Interlacements, 3. 
Interrupter, Wehnelt, 226. 
Introductory (Chapter I), i. 
Invention is imitation, 272. 
Iron, 39, 42; and oak contrasted, 45; 

and stone contrasted, 45 ; the hinge 

of electric art, 267; spectrum, 332, 

plate facing 332. 
Ives, F. E., composite heliochromy, 

285 ; kromskop, 286. 

Janssen, photographed transit Venus, 
317 ; photographed sun, 326; sug- 
gested spectro-heliograph, 339. 

Japanese modelling, 313. 

Jena glass, 276. 

Joule, J. P., 83. 

Jungfrau Railway, 164. 

Kearton, Cherry, naturalist -photog- 
rapher, 299. 

Keeler, J. E., proves Saturn's rings 
meteoric, 338. 

Kekul^ theory, 250. 

Kelvin, Lord, on dissipation of energy, 
87; portrait, facing 206; ocean teleg- 
raphy, 204; invents reflecting gal- 
vanometer, 205 ; siphon recorder, 2o5 ; 
galvanometers, 253; on cooking, 320; 
portrait much enlarged, 324. 

Kennelly, A. E., Electric Street Railways, 
162 ; on expert telegraphy, 243. 

Kinetic theory gases, 84. 

Kinetograph, 316 ; films, facing 316. 

Kinetoscope, 316. 

Kirchhoff, Charles, on fuel economy, 44. 



394 



INDEX 



Kirchhoff, G. R., spectroscopy, 332. 
Kites, in meteorology, 298 ; flown by 

Chinamen, 314. 
Kleist, Dean von, 98. 
Kodak, advantages of, 304; at work, 

380. 
Koenig, R., drawings of sound-flame, 

360. 

Labour, division of, photographic, 275. 

Lachine Rapids harnessed, 248. 

Lake-dwellings, Swiss, 32. 

Lamp, Eskimo, 12, 24; first, 14; incan- 
descent, 123; effect of increased vol- 
tage, 127; sixteen-candle, prices, 168. 

Landscape-gardening, photography 
aids, 302. 

Lane, J. Homer, 87. 

Langley, S. P., on cheapest light, 131; 
bolometer, 346. 

Language (Chapter XXV), 364; why 
vocal, 367 ; leap due to, 373 ; as so- 
cialiser, 377. 

Lauffen and Frankfort transmission, 155. 

Laussedat, Col., photo-theodolites, 296. 

Laws, conflict of, 76. 

Lea, M. C, photographic investigator, 

304. 305- 

Lead, 40 ; why best for storage battery, 
145 ; plates, 146. 

Leaps of progress, 5, 6, 20. 

Le Gray uses collodion films, 291. 

Lehigh Valley Railroad inductive tele- 
graph, 217. 

Lenard, P., bulb, 349. 

Lenses, accurate camera, 276; tested 
by polarised light, 303. 

Le Sage experiments, 179. 

Le Sueur process for sodium and chlo- 
rine, 141. 

Leyden jar, ocean cable like, 203. 

Light, electric (Chapter X), 121; cheap- 
ened by service motive power, 161; 
first artificial, 25 ; producers, their 
efficiencies, 122; velocity of, 79. 

Lighthouses denoted by wireless tele- 
graph, 224. 

Lightning, photographed, 360, plates 
facing 360. 

Literature, photography aids, 309. 

Locomotion, modern, 57. 

Locomotive, 54, 55; Baldwin, plate 
facing 57; rivalry of electric motor, 
165. 

Lodestone, 94, 262. 

Lodge, O. J., coherer, 219; telephone, 
235 ; wireless telegraph, 225 ; Signal- 
ling Without Wires, 356. 

Lomond experiments, 179. 

London, electric traction in, 163. 

Longitude ascertained photographically, 

303- 
Lovers' telegraph, 231. 
Lubbock, Sir John, on ' pa" and " ma," 

368. 
Luminescence, 349. 



Lure, fire as, 30. 

Lyra, ring nebula in, 342, plate facing 
342. 

Mach, photography plant growth, 316. 

Machines, united with electric motors, 
173, plate facing 162; explained by 
kinetoscope, 318. 

McKinley, WiUiam, bas-relief, 308. 

Maddox, R. L., invents gelatin dry 
plate, 292. 

Magnetic fines of force, 104, 105. 

Mallery, Garrick, pictographs, 373. 

Malthus, law of, 384, 

Man, ancestry of (Chapter XXVI), 379,9. 

Manufacturers, domestic, 259. 

Maori art, 301. 

Marconi wireless telegraph, 217. 

Marey, Movement, photochronograph, 
315- 

Mastery of metals (Chapter IV), 35. 

Match, phosphorus, 19. 

Maunder, Mrs., photographs corona, 
326. 

Maury, Miss A. C, discovery by, 337. 

Maver, Wilham, jr., American Teleg- 
raphy, 213. 

Maxwell, J. Clerk-, on cross-fertilisation 
of sciences, 74 ; on identity light and 
electricity, 218; colour-photography, 
285 ; rings of Saturn meteoric, 338. 

Mechanics, dawn of, 12 ; field of, broad- 
ened by electricity, 175, 176. 

Medicine, photography aids, 299, 358 ; 
X-rays aid, 353. 

Meissonier and photography of motion, 
312. 

Mendenhall, T. C, Century of Electri- 
city, 203, 212 ; on duplex telegraphy, 
212 ; on velocity electricity, 202. 

Merritt, Ernest, photography of sound- 
flame, 361. 

Mescal, 36. 

Metallurgy, American, 57. 

Metals, debt to, 45 ; mastery of (Chap- 
ter IV), 35. 

Metal-working, electric motor in, 159. 

Meteorology, photography aids, 298, 
358. 

Meteors photographed, 311. 

Micrometer, delicacy of, 338. 

Microphone, 232. 

Microphotography, 280. 

Milk splash photographed, 312. 

Milton, John, pictures Uriel, 244. 

Mimicry and naming, 366, 381. 

Mining, electric motor in, 158. 

Mirror, focussing solar rays, 46. 

Moissan, H., furnace, 115, 116. 

Money as medium of exchange, 256. 

Montgomerie, Dr. W., gutta-percha, 
194. 

Moon photographs, 325, 329. 

Moore, D. M., fight, 130. 

Morse, S. F. B., first experiments, 182; 
telegraphs through water, 215. 



INDEX 



395 



Motion, photography of, 312 ; in hne of 

sight, 333. 
Motive power from fire (Chapter V), 48. 
Motor, electric, 108, plate facing 162 ; 

and machine united, 158, 173, plate 

facing 162. 
Miiller, M., thought and language, 370; 

Science of LangKage, 370. 
Multiplex telegraphy (Chapter XV), 207. 
Multiplication contrasted with addition, 

2. 
Municipal electricity, 258. 
Munro, Dr. William, Prehistoric Prob- 
lems, II. 
Music, great, why recent ? 365. 
Muybridge, E., photography of motion, 

312; electrical control of cameras, 360. 
Myths prophetic, 91. 

Naming faculty, 367. 
National Museum, Washington, aborig- 
inal art, 301 ; photographic exhibits, 

324- 

Naturalist, photography aids, 298, 299. 

Navigation and wireless telegraph, 223, 
224. 

Neanderthal skull, 371. 

Nebulas, photographs, 330, 341, plates 
facing 341, 342 ; spectra of, 333 ; evo- 
lution of, 340. 

Nebular hypothesis, 340; modified, 342. 

Neighbourhood guild of science, 257. 

Nernst lamp, 128. 

New England electric lines, 164. 

New Zealand aboriginal art, 301. 

Newcomb, Simon, on possible limits 
universe, 88. 

Newton, Sir Isaac, 85. 

Niagara electric power, 154, 155, 158, 
248. 

Niagara, U. S. navy, cable-layer, 196. 

Nichols, E. F., photography of sound- 
flame, 361 ; of extremely rapid phe- 
nomena, 362. 

Nicholson, J. Whitall, " The West 
Wind," 307, plate facing 307. 

Nickel, 39 ; magnetism of, 268 ; plating, 
136. 

Nickel-steel, 42; for boilers, 60; for in- 
candescent lamps, 126. 

Niepce, Nicephore, photographic pio- 
neer, 271; portrait, facing 274; photo- 
graphic reproduction, 321. 

Norman Conquest, 37. 

Oak and iron contrasted, 45. 

Obsidian, 32. 

Oil-wells, burning, 10. 

Onesti, T. C, experiments, 219. 

Onomatopoeia, 368. 

Ordnance survey maps, electrotyped, 

138. . 
Orion, nebula in, 341, two plates facing 

.. 341- 

Orsted s discovery, 103, 180. 

Orthochromatic plates, 282; picture, 



tacing 283 ; in stellar spectroscopy, 

335. 
Oxygen from liquid air, 75. 
Oxyhydrogen light, 127. 
Ozone produced by electricity, 142; uses, 

142. 

Pacinotti ring, 107. 

Page, Dr., experiments, 228. 

Paintings photographed, 284. 

Paraguay hornless bull, 22. 

Parsons steam-turbine, 53, 56, plate 
facing 57. 

Pascal, a thought from, 381. 

Peary arctic photographs, 302. 

Periodic law, 89. 

Permutations, 3 ; English alphabet, 376 ; 
Arabic numerals, 376 ; notes piano, 
376 ; illustrated, 261, 381, 382, 383, 384, 

385. 

Persistence of force, 250, 

Personal equation eliminated, 359. 

Petroleum, 14. 

Philadelphia, City Hall dome, electro- 
plating, 137. 

Philosophy, scientific, 92, 387. 

Phoenicians and alphabet, 375. 

Phonograph electrically actuated, 168. 

Phosphorescence, 348, 355. 

Photochronograph, Marey's, 315. 

Photography, 4; threshold of (Chapter 
XIX), 262; microscope, 280; ortho- 
chromatic, 282; reductions, 280; stere- 
opticon, 278 ; colour, 285 ; of the skies 
(Chapter XXIII), 325 ; and electricity 
as aUies (Chapter XXIV), 346, 358; 
a new departure, 380. 

Photogravure, 322. 

Photomicrographs, 280. 

Photophone, 243. 

Photo-sculpture, G. G. Rockwood, 308. 

Photo-theodolites, 296. 

Photo-zincography, 322. 

Physician, photography aids, 299. 

Physiologist, photography aids, 299, 300. 

Pickering, E. C, uses doublet, 331 ; on 
value spectroscope, 336. 

Pickering, WiUiam, discovers ninth sat- 
ellite Saturn, 329. 

Pictographs, North American, 373. 

Pictorial photography, 305. 

Pictures, Indian, 265, 266. 

Pika, plate facing 299. 

Pinchot, Gifford, forestry photographs, 

295- 

Pithecan.th7'opus erectus, 371. 

Plate, rolled, 135. 

Plateau's zoetrope, 314. 

Platinum for incandescent lamps, 126. 

Play and work, 262. 

Player, J. Hort, photography by absorp- 
tion, 270. 

Poison removed, 26. 

Poitevin, carbon process, 323. 

Polarised light a searcher, 303. 

Polarity reversed (illus.), 210. 



396 



INDEX 



Pompeii, 33. 

Ponton, bichromated gelatin, 322. 

Porta, inventor camera obscura, 271. 

Portraits transmitted electrically, 171. 

Pottery, 27; probable origin, 28. 

Preece inductive telegraph, 217. 

Prescott, G. B., Speaking Telephone, 230. 

Prices low^ered with widened market, 
167. 

Printing, invention of, 374. 

Progress has leaps, 5, 380. 

Projectiles photographed, 312. 

Propeller, steamer, electrically con- 
trolled, 174. 

Properties of matter, 126 ; due to mo- 
tion, 85, 255 ; undesired, are sugges- 
tive, 282. 

Puma spots appear in photograph, 300. 

Pump-drill, Iroquois, 17. 

Punic wars, telegraph, 177. 

Quadruplex telegraphy, 213. 
Quick plates (Chapter XXII), 311. 

Railroad, electricity in service of, 249; 

indebted to telegraphy, 257. 
Raps, Dr., photography of sounds, 360. 
Rayleigh, Lord, photographed bursting 

bubble, 312. 
Reduction, photographic, 280. 
Refrigeration, effects extreme, 73, 74; 

value, ^^. 
Refrigerator, Frick, 66. 
Raid, James D., Telegraph in America, 

184. 
Reis, J. P., telephone, 228. 
Relays of old, 168 ; telegraphic, 168, 184. 
Rehgious fires, 13, 19, 25, 89. 
Remington and photography of motion, 

312. 
Repeaters, telegraphic, 169. 
Representation, its beginnings, 263 ; new 

departure in, 267, 273. 
Reproduction, photographic, 321. 
Research, claims of, 251; electricity in, 

250; rewarded in photography, 345; 

by X-rays, 357. 
Resistance telegraph hnes, 188. 
Reversibihty of dynamo and motor, 108. 
Reversible chemical processes, 144. 
Reversing-key, 209, 210. 
Revolution, electric and photographic, 

380. 
Richmond, Virginia, railway, 162. 
Roberts, Isaac, nebular evolution, 341 ; 

Photographs of Stars, Star Clusters, and 

NebulcB, 342. 
Roberts, Sir William, on science and 

art, 386. 
Roberts- Austen, Sir William, experi- 
ments with alloys, 36 ; on steel, 42. 
Rockwood, G. G., photo-sculpture, pho- 
to-effigies, 308. 
Roller-bearings, 43. 
Roman Catholic Church, new fire, 19. 
Roman numerals, 371. 



Romans, fire of, 13. 

Romer establishes velocity Hght, 79. 

Ronalds, Francis, experiments, 180. 

Rontgen, X-rays, 348, 350; tube pho- 
tographing bones of hand, 352 ; in 
surgery and medicine, 353; as detec- 
ters, 354; disclose growth, 354; ex- 
pose adulteration, 354 ; and telegraph, 
257- 

Rotch, A. L., meteorologist, 298. 

Rowland solar spectrum photographed, 
332. 

Ruhmkorff coil, 157. 

Rumford, Count, 82. 

Runge, C, ascertains longitude photo- 
graphically, 303. 

Russell, H. C, on stellar photography, 
337- 

Russell, W. J., photographs from in- 
visible rays, 355. 

Rutherfurd, L. M., photographs, 325. 

St. Victor uses glass for negatives, 291. 

Salt, production of, 29. 

Salva, experiments, 179; recommends 
resin as non-conductor, 193. 

Santa Ana River transmission, 156. 

Saturn's ninth satellite discovered, 329 ; 
rings meteoric, 338. 

Schaaf, E. O., medical camera, 358. 

Schmidt compound engine, 52. 

Schoolcraft, H. R., Indian Tribes, 266, 

Schultze, photographic pioneer, 269. 

Schweigger invents galvanometer, 180. 

Science, golden age of, 386. 

Scientific method, 387. 

Screen, colour, 283, 

Scripture, E. W., on value of illustra- 
tions, 309. 

Search-light, electric, 132. 

Seclusion feasible with electric mecha- 
nism, 172. 

Seeing through wires, 245. 

Selenium, characteristics utilised, 174; 
in photophone, 244. 

Senses educated and quickened, 242, 
337- 

Shaler, N. S., Domesticated Animals , 366. 

Shipboard, electric motors on, 159, 160. 

Ship-building, photography aids, 302. 

Shiras, George, III, photograph deer, 
plate facing 299. 

Shot photographed in flight, 312. 

Siemens' regenerative furnace, 44; sub- 
marine wire, 195. 

Sight, superseding touch, 272 ; devel- 
oped before hearing, 364. 

Signals, fire, smoke, 33. 

Significance common things, 8. 

Silver, recovered electrolytically, 140; 
the pivot of photography, 268. 

Siphon recorder and record, 206. 

Skill of lower animals, 11. 

Skulls, three remarkable, 371. 

Slawianoff" arc process, 113. 

Smallpox detected in photograph, 300. 



INDEX 



397 



Smoke signals, 33. 

Snow crystals photographed, 281. 

Sodium hyposulphite, 270. 

Solar eclipse, in drawings, 326; in pho- 
tographs, 326. 

Sommering experiments, 180. 

Sound, affected by motion of sounder, 
333; discloses form, 347; photo- 
graphed, 360. 

Space, occupied, limits, 88. 

Spectro-heliograph, 338. 

Spectroscopy, 331. 

Spectrum of sun lengthened by bolome- 
ter, 348, facing plate 347 ; of iron and 
of sun, 332, facing plate 337, 

Speech, articulate, 2, 3, 367. See Lan- 
guage. 

Spencer, Herbert, quoted, 7. 

"Sports," 22. 

Star chart, photographic, 331. 

Stars discovered by photography, 338. 

Staten Island Railroad inductive tele- 
graph, 216. 

Statuary electrolytic, 138, 139. 

Steam, high-pressure, 50. 

Steamboat, first, 55. 

Steam-boiler improved, 58. 

Steam-engine, 49; big, 60; compound, 
51,52; marine, 50; displaced by elec- 
tric motors, 160, 161. 

Steamships, 50. 

Steam-turbine, 52, plate facing 57. 

Stearns, J. B., duplex telegraph, 212. 

Steel, 41. 

Steinheil's discovery, 182, 185. 

Stephenson, George, 55. 

Stereopticon, uses and revelations, 278. 

Stereoscope, 277. 

Stevens, B. F., Manuscripts relatmg to 
America, 310. 

Stieglitz, A., pictorial photography, 307. 

Stockholm, telephone in, 240. 

Stoker, mechanical, 61. 

Stokes, Sir G., fluorescence, 348. 

Stone and iron, contrasted, 45 ; boilers, 
26 ; in fire, 12. 

Storage-battery, 143 ; as reservoir and 
equaliser, 147; for traction, 162. 

Strike-a-light, 16, 20. 

Sturgeon's electromagnet, 104. 

Subtraction, profit of, 77. 

Suburban electric traction, 163, 164. 

Subways, electric, 162. 

Sugar-refining, electricity in, 142. 

Sun, photographed, 311 ; spectrum of, 
332, plate facing 337; worship, 89. 

Superheater, 51. 

Surgery, kinetographs in, 318 ; X-rays 
aid, 353. 

Surveying, photographic, 296, 297. 

Swan, J. W., incandescent lighting, 124, 
125. 

Sweden, telephone in, 240. 

Synchronism in electrical mechanism, 
171. 

Synthesis, electrical, 142, 143, 152. 



Tanning, electric, 142. 

Taylor, Isaac, The Alphabet, 374. 

Telegraphy, electric, forerunners, 178; 
benefits, 188, 189, 190, 257; and rail- 
roads, 257 ; diplex, 208 ; duplex, 210 
(illus.). 211, 212; expert, 243; first 
American, 183; grasp of, 226 ; Gray's 
harmonic, 172 ; Henry, 181 ; induc- 
tive, 216; in war, 385; land lines, 
(Chapter XIII), 177; cable (Chapter 
XIV), 193; multiplex (Chapter XV), 
207; quadruplex, 213; wireless 
(Chapter XVI), 215; synchronous, 
214 ; a new departure, 379. 

Telephone (Chapter XVII), 228; dis- 
sected, 233; long-distance, 234, 236; 
uses, 234, 236 ; barbed-wire fences for, 
238 ; Budapest news service, 238 ; in 
Sweden, 240; rivalry with telegraph, 
241; rural service, 238; sensitiveness, 
242. 

Telephotography, 297, plate facing 298. 

Telescopic lenses tested by polarised 
light, 303. 

Tesla light, 129, 130. 

Thermo-battery, 102. 

Thermometer, electrical, 103; in cylin- 
der's mass, 173. 

Third-rail system, 165, plate facing 165. 

Thompson, S. P., phosphorescence, 
355 ; Light, Visible and Invisible, 356. 

Thomson, Ehhu, utility extreme cold ; 
electric welder, 112 ; high-tension ex- 
periments. 252. 

Thomson, Sir William, ^ee Lord Kelvin. 

Three-colour photographic process, 287. 

Thurston, R. H., on steam-pressures, 
50 ; on most efficient American en- 
gine, 52. 

Time infinitesimal, photography in, 362 ; 
reductions in photography, 290. 

Tin, 36. 

Tinder, 16, 17. 

Top studied mathematically, 313. 

Torpedo, actuated electrically, 169 ; with- 
out wires, 224. 

Toys, significance of, 313. 

Traction, electric, 161. 

Transformer, 156. 

Treadwell, Augustus, Jr., Storage Bat- 
tery, 147. 

Triggers pulled electrically, 169. 

Tripler hquefies air, 72. 

Trowbridge, John, on Hertz waves, 225 ; 
high-tension experiments, 252. 

Troy, fall of, telegraphed, 177. 

Trusts, problem of, 192. 

Turbine, steam, 52, plate facing 57. 

Turbinia, 56. 

Tyndali , John , Heat as a Mode of Motion, 
254 ; researches, 254. 

Types, movable, 374. 

Ultra-violet ray discharges electrified 

plate, 350. 
Univei'se enlarged, 254. 



39« 



INDEX 



Vacuum, produced by extreme cold, 74. 

Vail, Alfred, invents telegraphic alpha- 
bet, 182. 

Vancouver, telegram Montreal to, 169. 

Van Vleck, John, generating plant, 60. 

Varley, S. A., experiments, 218. 

Verbs, 369, 

Versatility of electricity, 249. 

Very, F. W., " Cheapest Form of 
Light," 131. 

Victorium, 339. 

Vision develops before hearing, 364. 

Vogel, H. W., orthochromatic plates 
282. 

Volcanoes, 10; their lesson, 21. 

Volta, pile, 100 ; crown of cups, loi 
illustration facing 107 ; portrait, fa- 
cing 100; influence of, 5, 27. 

Voltages, highest easiest transmitted 
155- 

Walker, C. V., submarine line, 195. 
War, an evil of, removed by telegraphy 

189 ; risk for lack cable, 198. 
Water-supply, 258. 

Watson, Dr. William, experiments, 179 
Watt improves steam-engine, 49. 
Weather Bureau uses telegraph, 189. 
Weber experiments, 181. 
Wedgwood, photographic pioneer, 269 
Wehnelt interrupter, 226. 
Welder, electric, 112. 
Welsbach burner, 128. 



Westinghouse, steam-engine, 51 ; turbo- 
alternator, plate facing 57. 

Wheatstone and Cooke telegraph, 182. 

Whispering-gallery, world a, 192. 

Whitney, W. D., language why vocal, 
367 ; Life and Growth of Language, 
367, 371 ; advantages language, 370 ; 
Max Milller aitd the Science of Lan- 
guage, 370. 

Will, signature to, appears in photo- 
graph, 300. 

Wireless telegraphy (Chapter XVI), 
215. 

Witt, Herr, discovers Eros, 329. 

Woods easiest kindled, 16, 

Work and play, 262. 

World a whispering-gallery, 192. 

Writing, 2, 263, 373. 

X-rays, 348. 

Yacht race reported by wireless tele- 
graph, 223. 

Young, C. A., General Astronomy , 88. 

Young, Thomas, argues for ether, 80; 
error of, 109; theory of colour, 285. 

Zenger, M., photographs at night, 327, 

Zero, absolute, 72. 

Zinc photo-process, 322. 

Zoetrope, 314. 

Zoroaster, 90. 

Zuni priests as fire-kindlers, 17. 



